


and then come mornings

by youremyqueen



Series: nights-verse [2]
Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Fix-It, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Polyamory, Therapy, Wammy House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-01 20:48:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 45,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11494470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: The birth-death-ressurection cycle, as relayed by a heretic.(a coda toNights+ the light/l/b domestic ot3 that nobody asked for.)





	1. you

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [夜后黎明](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15099698) by [LovingStranger_13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovingStranger_13/pseuds/LovingStranger_13)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the facts are these: i’m never going to finish nights in its current incarnation. it’s way too long, self-indulgent, problematic, incoherent, and morally unscrupulous for me to possibly ever pick up where i left off. i don’t even remember half of what was going on, or what i was intending to communicate. i’m no longer really in the death note fandom at all. and yet—it’s nice to tie up loose ends, isn’t it? and, in a way, revisiting an old story is like making peace with a past version of yourself. i’m not going to pretend that anyone’s waiting around for this. but. here it is, anyway. i want this on the record.
> 
> everyone in this is horrendously ooc from canon. whoops! it takes place after the last posted chapter of nights, is written backwards and sideways, and though i tried to keep it consistent with the universe established in nights as far as i could, there are many things that i'm aware of having changed and probably many that i have forgotten about.
> 
> can you understand this without reading nights? probably not in its entirety, but i'd rather you try this fic out than attempt to read all 300k+ of that one. (i was young and did not understand that concept of brevity when i wrote it.) can you understand this fic even if you have read nights? possibly not. say it with me now: whoops! all you really need to know is: L lives, B lives, and Light went to the shinigami realm. that's it.
> 
> this is part one of two. part two is 20k and growing and i should be done with it within the week, and then this fic is really, truly finished. i'm not going to kid myself that this is going to be a hit (it's fanfic of fanfic, in a semi-dead fandom, that features a main character who isn't even really in the canon) but i wrote it faster and with more enthusiasm than i have written anything in years, and it's made me very happy.
> 
> thank you very much for reading.

It starts like this: there is a riotous sea under his skin when Light touches him.

No, wait. Nevermind. It does not start like that at all.

 

—

 

January of 1980, at St. John’s Parish, in Suffolk. He’ll start there. That’s not the beginning, either, but the full story spans from the soles of history’s feet to the crown of its head, and makes the Holy Bible look like Cliff’s Notes—which, in a way, it kind of is—so he’s only going cover the parts that are both, a) pertinent to the occasion, and b) true, according to his judgment and/or experience, or close enough to the truth to hold up in the International Court of Justice, should it come to that. Kira forbid.

He knows this part is true. He doesn’t remember it, but the story was told to him so many times by so many earnest priests over the course of his early childhood that he has always been able to see blurry snowfall when he closes his eyes. It's either that, or television static. Depends on whether or not you buy the robot theory.

The story, as Father Gregory tells it, goes like this:

“It was the harshest snow in a long winter chock full of harsh snows, and the road back into town was blocked for miles, all of us stuck at the chapel together for the duration, eating canned beans and worrying we’d have to drink the holy water. 2 PM and you’d think it was the dead of night, with how gray the sky was. I remember that one of my flock asked why God had seen fit to cast this blizzard down upon us, and I found it an oddly Pagan thought—until you arrived. Our Lord has not punished his people with storms since the Flood, but He does send gifts in the guise of curses. The knocks fell heavily on the chapel door, heavy enough to be heard through the storm. If it was your mother who left you with us, she sure had an arm on her. We opened the door, and there you were, wrapped in blankets in that crummy little rocking basket. You weren’t crying, and we thought for sure you’d die, but once the storm cleared and we’d taken you to hospital, we realized that you simply didn’t have it in you to throw fits. You were the gravest baby I’ve ever seen to date, quivering impassively, as if you weren’t very impressed with what you’d seen of the world so far, but didn’t think it was worth the effort to make a fuss.”

The story, as L tells it, if he tells it, goes like this:

“I was raised in a church.”

That’s it. No unnecessary detail, no indication as to the specific location or denomination of the church, nothing that could be linked back to the priests or Wammy’s House or the birth certificate that had been tucked into his blankets with the father’s name scratched out. If he were to elaborate, however, he might say, “I was fostered in a church in Suffolk by a parish of generally decent Anglican priests who tried, without success, to have me adopted by a loving family, until I was six years old, when a man who ran an elite private orphanage which advertised its ‘educational rigor’ but failed to disclose its accompanying emotional disfigurement took an interest in me. You see, sometimes ‘He’ sends curses in the guise of gifts, too.”

He might say that. He might blink, and hold his smile still in the back of his throat.

 

—

 

“You’re not telling it right,” B says. “You’re skipping over all the best parts.”

“We haven’t gotten to those yet.”

“Your father’s name scratched out? Your mother’s heavy fist-falls? There are unsolved mysteries all over the place and you’re not even through the opening sequence. Didn’t you ever even try to find your parents?”

L jolts one of his eyebrows. He’s stopped shaving them off, because—well, they’re getting to that. “Did you ever try to find yours?”

B grins. “I’m trying now, aren’t I?” The joke is only really funny if one knows that one of B’s parents was probably a God of Death from a world that exists perpendicular to our own, who bred—contrary to Shinigami law, L’s been told—with a human. Yes, they’re getting to that, also.

“I thought you couldn’t look for your parents,” Mello says, glancing from his notepad to his laptop and back again. “It’s a Wammy’s rule, isn’t it?”

B scoffs shrilly. “I broke all the rules.”

L shrugs. “I made all the rules. We’re getting off topic.” Under the table, he feels B’s bare foot slide up his leg, toes soft and seeking, and kicks him off without letting a muscle shift in his face.

B licks his lips and slumps lower in his chair. “Not possible. Everything we say is relevant, even if it’s not in order. Mihael can go back and rearrange, right, sweets?”

Mello licks his thumb, turns a page, and scrawls something onto a yellow sticky note. “Uh. Sure. I mean, as long as you give specific dates, the information doesn’t have to be chronological. Could be better that way, actually. Makes it so I have to tell the story myself, instead of just rephrasing the both of you into sounding more… sane. No offense, L.”

“Hmm? It’s quite alright.”

In truth, he’d barely been listening, distracted by the way B’s mouth had curled around the word _sweets_. He’s gotten used to hearing Mello’s real name, but he’ll never adjust to the cloying pet names, or the way that Mello seems to lean into them. B’s foot is climbing back up his leg. L wants to kick him again, harder this time, but instead he lets it reach his crotch, curl over his soft cock, and _push_.

“You heard the boy,” B says. “Let’s cut straight to the good part.”

L disguises his wince with a cough. “Which one?” He wishes he could pretend to be above this.

“You mean, me or him?”

L nods. “You or him. You pick.”

B sucks on his front teeth.

“Him,” Mello says, quick and commanding, his newfound confidence bristling up and getting in the way again. He clicks his pen twice and gives B a fond, remorseless look. “We’ll work up to you.”

 

—

 

 _Him_ :

Light Yagami was born in 1986 to Soichiro and Sachiko Yagami, a Tokyo Police Department deputy and secretary respectively. Many events which are relevant to this story happened between the years 1986 and 2003—including, but not limited to: the arrival of Beyond Birthday, age 6, at Wammy’s House Orphanage (c. 1987); the suicide of Alejandro Garces, age 17, at, and the respective departures of L Lawliet, age 18, and Beyond Birthday, age 16, from Wammy’s House Orphanage (c. 1996); the arrival of Mihael Keehl, age 8, at Wammy’s House Orphanage (c. 1997); the death and attempted resurrection of Sadie Markovitch, age 29, by Beyond Birthday, age 19, in Bromley, London (c. 2000)—but none of them involved Light Yagami.

L knows every detail of the interim period, anyway. Knows what marks Light received in primary school, knows what his parents said about him in marriage counseling—“He’s a truly manageable child!”—knows who had a crush on him in high school and who—read: no one—he had a crush on. He knows other things, too, data which can only be gathered from the primary source, such as:

“When I was very young—I mean really young, I don’t know how old; young enough not to have much physical autonomy of my own—I believed that I could control other people with my mind. It wasn’t until I got a little older and gained a rudimentary understanding of the physical laws that I realized that the reason people did whatever I wanted them to anytime I wanted them to was not just because I thought it at them, but because that thought then translated into a certain facial expression and tone of voice which made my parents, my teachers, other kids at school just _want_ to do whatever I wanted them to. I guess that, in a way, I was controlling them with my mind.”

He said that to L once. L doesn’t remember whether or not Light had his memories or not at the time, or whether they were in the taskforce headquarters or the shitty basement apartment or the abandoned office building, he only recalls the feeling of his warm breath against his face.

“Try it on me,” L had replied.

Light had shaken his head quick, too quick, like he was almost afraid. “No, no, it never works on you. Believe me.”

Anyway. 2003.

Light Yagami found a notebook. L assumes that all parties concerned with this record already know what happened next, but because Mello prods him to retell it in his own words, he does.

Light Yagami found a notebook that said: _Any human whose name is written in this note shall die_. It was both very explicit and very opaque. The rules which governed the ways in which humans could be killed, under what circumstances and with control over which factors, were explained in detail, but every other question one might have asked was left unanswered. Where did the Death Note come from? Who wrote the rules? Who enforced the rules? What power made it possible for these deaths to be carried out? And, perhaps, most relevant to our story, from which world, if not our own, did this notebook originate?

Light Yagami, however, was not excessively concerned with the answers to these questions. Light Yagami, age 17, was concerned with one thing and one thing only. You might assume, from his age, socioeconomic status, and appearance that this thing might be, for example, video games, the approval of his peers, or, perhaps, sex with attractive women—but these were all, in fact, things that Light had no interest in beyond the understanding that he would have to participate in them in order to maintain his disguise as a male of his age, socioeconomic status, and appearance. All Light Yagami cared about, really, was Justice*.

(*For the record, “Justice,” with a capital J, will serve to denote the merciless punishment by death, without necessitating a permissible court decision of guilt, of murderers, sexual offenders, violent assailants, thieves, spies, as well as all other classes of criminal, police officers, detectives, government officials, government employees, international liaisons, vigilantes, independent contractors, television personalities, and individuals found distasteful for other, often unspecified, reasons, along with unavoidable victims of happenstance. This will help to avoid confusion with the generally agreed-upon dictionary definition of justice as behavior, treatment, or law which is morally right, fair, or deserved.)**

(**To avoid further confusion, ”Justice!” with a capital J and an exclamation point, will serve to denote those instances in which the word is being used by a third party—more often than not: L—to mock the previously explained definition of “Justice.”)

Light enacted Justice every day and every night. Light carried his Death Note everywhere with him, the way his younger sister, Sayu Yagami, carried her Game Boy Advance. Light had always been popular among his classmates, and while the mingled admiration and jealousy of his peers did not decrease in this time period, he did spend increasingly less time with them as he began to spend more and more time with Justice. Also, a giant, leathery, black Shinigami named Ryuk, who was visible only to Light, followed him wherever he went. These circumstances served, more than the exceptional intelligence and inability to empathize with most other human beings that he’d had his whole life, to estrange him from the rest of the world, to the point when, within a few weeks of finding the Death Note and perfecting his personal definition of Justice, he began to alternate inconsistently between believing that he a) would become a god, b) already was a god, or c) already was the only God.

His delusion was, understandably, upset by his pursuit by, acquaintance to, and eventual sexual and romantic affair with the detective known as L.

Ah, sweet Justice!

 

—

 

“We need to take a break,” B says, pulling his toes from where they’d been tucked against L’s scrotum and planting both feet flat on the floor. When he sits up to his full height, he becomes less comical and more unnerving. Something ghoulish used to flicker at B’s corners—where his jawline meets his earlobes, the places where the insides of his elbows crease—but now that the thing has learned its own name, it has come subtly into focus, day by day by night, to the point where one need not waste time wondering if this is a person or a beast that they’re looking at. The answer is obvious; the answer is yes.

“I’m fine,” L says. His throat is dry. He doesn’t know how long he’s been talking without pause.

B stands from his chair. “Didn’t ask, kitten.” He taps his pack of B&H Silvers on his palm and undulates to the balcony door with a look that suggests that L is expected to follow him.

They’re in L’s so-called ‘personal’ flat in Covent Garden, recognizable by its minimal furnishings, unopened cardboard boxes, and layers of dust thick enough for B to trace his name onto almost every surface but the refrigerator and the toilet. L mostly sleeps, eats, shits, and showers at his ‘office’ flat, a smaller, cheaper, less heavily windowed apartment on Wood Street, which hums and glows twenty-fours a day with the same wattage as the New York City skyline, computers, monitors, phones, printers, faxes and walkie-talkies all blinking and flashing and speaking in irate Hungarian, fluid Mandarin, lively Australian-English, swift binary, and a hundred other languages that he wishes he could get away with not knowing. He has solved 146 cases in the eight months since—since the Kira case ended. He is, as the media has put it, on a roll.

He slumps further into one of the uncomfortable chairs that he’d purchased specifically for this occasion, presses his index fingers to the inner corners of his eyebrows to staunch his constantly oncoming headache, and tries not to feel anything in particular.

“Guess you’ve given up on trying to get him not to call you degrading nicknames, too, huh?” Mello asks, the cap of his pen sticking out of his mouth and muffling his words.

“About a decade ago, yes.”

He doesn’t look at Mello’s face. It’s not that he doesn’t like him—in fact, he’s found him far more palatable than any child raised under care of Roger Ruvie has any right to be—but ever since Mello turned down his offer of the successor title, things have been even more horrendously awkward between them than they were before. He has no idea what to say to a sixteen-year-old in the first place, let alone one whose disappoint in him is heavy enough to be palpable.

“Look,” Mello says, when the silence doesn’t let up on its own, “you know you don’t have to do this, right? I’m not naive. I know talking about this shit is really hard for you. Wedy didn’t even want me to ask you, said I’d just be dredging up things that should stay buried, and B—well, he did want me to ask you, but he thought for sure you’d say no.”

“Well, I couldn’t have the events going on record from his point-of-view alone, could I?”

“I wouldn’t have wanted to write that, anyway. Too raunchy for my style.”

L lets his eyes drop from the dust gathered in great gray swaths on the motionless ceiling fan, looking Mello in the face the way he doesn’t like to do. His cheeks are still soft with baby fat even as the steely, decent determination drains out of his eyes by the day.

“What else does Wedy say?” he asks.

Mello’s lips curl up at the edges. “Try harder, mostly. Go faster, work better, be stronger, on and on and on, until I think I’m about to die, and then she’ll just suddenly arbitrarily decide we’re done for the day, tell me good job, and take me and Matt for drinks.”

L nods. That sounds about right. He tries to think of something else to say. “And Matt?”

“Same as ever.”

“I mean to say, is she just as hard on him?”

Mello’s grin grows. “Harder.”

 

—

 

Out on the balcony, B is lighting a second cigarette with the first one still sticking out of his mouth, elbows leant on the railing, calling to the pigeons in a language of shrugs and whispers that, he’s told L, “they understand but don’t like to answer.” When L pulls the sliding glass door closed behind him, B hands him the burnt down end of his first cigarette and puffs on the fresh one.

L blinks at his outstretched hand. “I quit, remember?”

“That’s why I’m giving you the little guy.” He wiggles his fingers. “Come on. You need it.”

“You don’t know what I need,” L huffs, but takes it anyway. “That was a joke, of course.” He smokes it down to the filter, and then he just smokes the filter.

“I could tell. Your delivery’s getting better. Few more of those, and we’ll have you up on amateur stand-up night.” He sniffs, nasal and paltry. A pigeon rolls its eyes at him. “Is your dick hard?”

L snorts. “No. Commendable effort, but I think the nauseous chest pains that talking about Light gives me puts a damper on the whole foot fetish. Sorry. Also, you know, there was a minor in the room who is, legally, my ward, so.” He shrugs, stubs his butt out on the railing and drops it into the ashtray that he keeps out here for B and B only, because he, remember, has quit. “Yours?”

“Minimally. It’s okay. You know how I like to wait.”

L rolls his eyes. His face used to get hot—not because of the implicit filth, but at the tone of voice, the fondness and the self-surrender—but now he’s just used to it. B haunts him close these days, just like when they were kids. His own personal, multipurpose ghost.

“You’re going have to wait all week, if the Malhotra case proceeds the way I think it’s likely to,” L says. “And, if Mello’s really serious about writing this mess into sense, I’m going to have to devote all my free time to these sessions. I want the confessional portion of the process over with as soon as possible.”

B doesn’t move but somehow he’s closer. He knows tricks like that. “About your chest pains,” he begins, poking L in the center of his sternum.

“Don’t.”

“I still think he’s coming back.”

“I know what you think.”

L has to hold these things very still inside of himself, or else bad moments come and turn into bad days and bad weeks. He had a lot of bad weeks when Light first… left. He still leaves Soichiro Yagami drunken, apologetic voicemails sometimes. He sends Misa money at random, even though she’s making enough in royalties to live comfortably at this point. She doesn’t perform anymore. He’s not sure what she does, out in the Japanese countryside—gardens, mostly, is what she’d said in her e-mails, though he’s not sure he believes that. He keeps tabs on the local police stations and newspapers near her town, just in case.

“I see him, you know. Not Light, but his pet, the leather-daddy thing.”

L pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’ll give you my fortune if you promise not to say the word ‘daddy’ ever again.”

“You knew what I meant immediately, though, right?” B’s smirk is disfigured, but all the more compelling for it. “He skulks in the corners of our nights. I think he’s keeping an eye on you for Light. That’s my theory, anyway. Could just get a kick out of maladjusted detective hijinks. I sure do.”

“Please,” L asks him, earnest as he can get without embarrassing himself, “keep your theories to yourself.”

“Yes, Daddy.” B bats his bug-eyes and kisses L on the forehead, lips dry for once, minus all the theatrical salivation. He’s toned himself down in the past few months. L thinks the satisfaction of finding out he’s an actual monster has made him less eager to prove himself one to everyone. Wedy thinks, and has told L—though he hadn’t asked—that it’s because he’s finally happy. It’s probably just the therapy.

L rolls his eyes, but leans into him.

 

—

 

“We don’t have to keep going,” Mello says, but his pen is still uncapped and he looks eager.

“I’m fine,” L says, because he can feel both sets of eyes on him. “If I stop I won’t want to start again.”

Then maybe you shouldn’t be talking about it, no one says. No one dares to. B calls out for Lebanese while L picks up where he left off.

 

—

 

Love affair.

That sounds so twee, doesn’t it? Like they were on a holiday in Barbados and caught each other’s eyes on a white sand beach. There was nothing remotely romantic about it, apart from, perhaps, the thrill. There was no flirtation, no warm, buzzing interest, no seduction, no budding trust or intimacy. L was completely enamored with him before they ever spoke. He can admit to that much now.

He has always done this. He falls in—not love, but something cerebral, all-encompassing, and highly illegal that resembles it—with criminals all the time. He blames B for the tendency. The codependence of their early childhood habituated a correlation between crime and affection, so that L’s subconscious has historically supported itself on the emotional tension produced by his pursuit of a morally reprehensible, often unknowing query. All of his relationships have been either entirely one-sided—he’d operated under the disguise of detective gathering clues, but low down he feels like he’s always been a common stalker,obsessing over the movements and the moods of strangers, staring into their bedrooms, searching through their things—or else two-sided only up to the point of his victory, at which time they’d revert to an unreciprocated state, as he’d lose all interest in a person once he’d solved their case.

Light was—is?— _was_ —the exception.

It’s not as if no one’s ever kidnapped L before. It’s not as if no one’s ever looked at him like that, or touched him so well, or made him feel so good about himself. Light’s not even the only one of his criminals to purport to be a god. He’s just the only one who’s ever made a strong case for it.

He thinks it happened in the apartment, the one without windows where Light kept him chained to a bed for a few weeks. Mello gets this look of discomfort that makes L come out and say, for the record, that Light never sexually assaulted him, and that nothing worse was done to him than what he had done to Light previously. In the apartment, because by the time he was locked up in the office building, he no longer had any real desire to escape, but back in investigation headquarters, he had been fully prepared to do whatever he could to have Light convicted and put to death, despite his fondness for him. Call it Stockholm syndrome, if you must. That, too, is a form of love.

Here’s L’s real theory on why he felt—feels?— _felt_ —what he did for Light: chance. Why does anyone fall in love, after all? If one believes in predestination and soulmates and that sort of rot, then Kira bless, but most events in the universe are caused by electrons knocking into one another at random. L was hit at the right time with the right sort of weapon. He was beaten down with the right sort of weapon. Maybe when his wounds heal, he’ll fall out of love, but he’s starting to believe that no one ever really falls out of love, they just lock it up somewhere inside and let it stay there. Usually it doesn’t come out again.

Sometimes it does.

B sneezes. The doorbell buzzes and he goes downstairs to let the deliveryman in.

 

—

 

“He must have loved you, too.”

“I suppose you mean that’s why he didn’t kill me? Yes, that’s one theory.”

“Well, what’s another?”

“Fear of being alone. I was the first and only person that he ever saw as being alike to himself, and, to some extent, that bothered him, because it poked holes in his dogma of ego, but on another level I think he was so relieved to know that he wasn’t the only thing alive in the universe. I’m not going to say that he was incapable of empathy, because in some sense empathy was just as integral to Kira’s gospel as megalomania, but his empathy was contingent on value judgements, and he was incapable of valuing other people. He could feel sentiment for conceptual victims, murder statistics, cases on the news, but not for individuals as he met them. Everyone disappointed him. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling, Mello; it comes with the territory. The difference between Light and most other people of exceptional intelligence is that, while we are often disappointed in others, we are also continually disappointed in ourselves, desperate to be better, to prove our worth again and again. Light might not have been without empathy, but he was without humility. Everything he did was always right, and since I worked in opposition to him, everything I did was always wrong. I’m not sure he really could have loved me, under those circumstances. In his own backwards way, I think he was just trying to save me.”

“In your own backwards way, weren’t you trying to save him?”

 

—

 

“Did you ever start to believe him, over the course of your imprisonment? I mean, believe in his vision, his morality? Did you ever doubt that you were on the right side?”

“No, not—not during that time. It was very hard to get on board with any of Light’s ideas when he was actually around, explaining them, because he was absolutely, feverishly deranged much of the time, and would go into these religious ecstasies, like a preacher inhabited by the holy spirit, that kind of thing. He’d give me sermons that made my skin crawl. I never believed he was holy while he was trying to prove it to me. It was only in some moments, when he was asleep, or drunk, or otherwise unaware of himself, that he seemed to me to be someone good. And then, of course—after.”

“After what? Oh, you mean—yeah. Do you wanna talk about that?”

“Not really.”

“I’ll talk about it.”

“No thanks, B.”

“No, no, I don’t mind if he speaks for me in this instance. It’s easier that way.”

“That’s what I’m for. You see that, right, Mihael? I was put on this earth to be the physical manifestation of all of L’s inner turmoil. When he’s upset my skin starts going gray, but when he’s happy my hair stands on end, like I’ve been hit with static. Just remember, if I ever look like shit, it’s L’s fault.”

“I’m not putting that in my notes.”

“That’s your thematic loss. So, eight months ago, hmm?”

 

—

 

The first thing that happened after Light left— _left_ , not disappeared, not died, not ascended; because his body remained, his body was still alive, and… ascended just sounds cheesy—was that L got a bloody nose.

He knows he physically fought with Misa, but he’s almost certain that isn’t what caused it. She was sobbing so hard that her punches were half-hearted, like the play-fighting of a child. He remembers her fists against his chest, and holding her in his arms because he’d needed something to clutch and she’d needed something to blame. Seeing the dark red droplets fall on her white hospital gown, and apologizing.

For the blood at first, and then for other things.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry, Misa.”

He remembers taking the elevator to the ground floor. The building unlocked itself, and all the smoke and swill was gone, and things were just as they had always been in Tokyo. It was a clean, bright morning. B carried Light’s body and L held Misa’s hand and Rem floated behind them like a sentinel. L received a lot of calls that morning. He had a lot of difficult conversations during which he held it together admirably. The only time the veneer came close to cracking was when Sachiko and Sayu Yagami arrived at Light’s hospital room.

Soichiro was asleep in a chair, which is the only reason that L was allowed in, nevermind that he was, and still is, footing the entire medical bill for life-support and constant care. His sister and his mom think that he’s in a coma. They think he’s probably going to wake up. That must be nice for them.

Anyway, eight months ago: Sachiko was crying, and Sayu’s face was red like she had been, mouth clenched like she refused to do it again.

“Are you him?” she snapped at L, who’d been trying to slip out quietly.

“Am I who?”

“You know.” She gestured impotently, voice straining to keep upright. “Him. The guy.”

L’s still not sure what she’d meant by that exactly, but at the time he’d nodded. “Yes. I’m the guy.”

She didn’t look like she knew what to say to that, so she just took her mom’s hand and told her, “It’s okay, it’ll be okay. He’s alive. Everyone’s alive.”

L took his cue and walked out of the room, walked out of the hospital, walked on bare feet until B pulled up beside him in the parking lot, reached over to open the back passenger door, and said, “I promise it’s not stolen. It’s Watari’s.”

L crawled into the car and lay down on the backseat, face pressed into the leather cushioning, and said nothing. Nothing torrential happened. There were no geniuses in that car. L felt like he had lost an arm or a leg or some semi-vital organ, but that’s just what it feels like to lose a loved one. There was nothing going on but regular old human grief, same as anyone experiences it. L cried quietly, and B let him, speaking to him lowly about things that he didn’t understand and didn’t need to. He fell asleep in that car and when he woke up, Matt was in the front passenger’s seat, only L couldn’t remember his name at the time, he only knew he was a Wammy's child who wasn’t Mello and wasn’t Near.

He sat up and said, “What time is it?”

Around nine o’clock at night, they told him.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Home, they told him.

 

—

 

Possibly, concerned parties are wondering about the case of the Tokyo child killer, the whereabouts of Sydney Grauss, and the fate of the creature that was once Sadie Markovitch.

Matt tells it like this:

“He tracked me down in London, said he’d seen Mello, said he needed to find B, so I got in contact with Wammy’s and they flew us out here. Roger doesn’t really know what to do when shit hits the fan. He always just throws money at emergencies. I was just hyped to get out of the UK. I know Wammy brings kids in from all over the world, but I was born in Glasgow and I’ve never been further east than Cambridge. Fuck of a flight, though, isn’t it? Well, he was an alright guy. Nice ink on him. Really clean lines, you know? Thought the thing about his ex walking the earth as some sort of zombie-vampire deal was shit, but he was getting me where I wanted to go, so I didn’t argue.

Roger put us up in a hotel near Narita, on the Wammy’s dime. Nice one, too—mini-bar and everything. We had separate rooms, down the hall from each other, so I—I mean, I couldn’t have heard anything in the night even if I’d been trying to. Well, I got the call from Wammy the next morning, saying where to find Mello and where to find B, and I went ‘round to Syd’s door and knocked, but there wasn’t any answer. Tried calling his phone, but that went to voicemail. Eventually, I got a maid to open the room up for me by giving her this spiel about my uncle’s weak heart, but there wasn’t anybody in there. The bed looked slept in, though. There were imprints on both pillows, like two people’s heads had lain there. Here’s some pro bono detective work for you: somebody else had been in that room with him. But, like you saw on the camera feed, no one went in, and he never went out. It’s like an Agatha fucking Christie, isn’t it?

Oh, yeah, and there was something else. A smell. Like—I don’t want to say oranges, because it wasn’t quite, but something like that, only gone sour. Something chemical, almost sulfurous. I know that’s ghost story shit, okay? I know.”

L did watch the tapes. L saw Sydney Grauss go into his hotel room and not come out. L combed through the room, smelled the smells, inspected the shapes in the bedsheets. L checked the closets for ghouls. L ate the complimentary mints.

B said, “Not every story ends in answers.”

“All of mine have.”

“Well, then maybe we’re just not at the end yet.”

L didn’t leave that room for five days. Watari kept booking and rebooking him flights to Heathrow. L kept saying, “I need to solve this case,” and B kept saying, “She’s gone, he’s gone, _he’s gone_ ,” and L would say, “Tell me again what you saw,” and B would say, “Pure white light, the kind of light that blinds lesser eyes, the kind that’s full of hands and other things that pull you in. I’m not saying he’s in a better place but I’m saying he’s in another place,” and L would say, “No, tell me again. You’re not telling it right.”

That was eight months ago. Neither Sydney Grauss nor the creature that was once Sadie Markovitch have been located. No crimes consistent with those of the Tokyo child killer have been reported. L has not stopped looking for ghouls, but he has stopped expecting them.

Not every story ends in answers.

 

—

 

The night reaches that point where it’s over, but cannot quite be put away. Mello misses the last train and sleeps on the sofa. L offers him the bedroom—“I don’t use it, anyway,”—but there is still some quality of reverent unfamiliarity between them that makes him grateful to be declined. Unopened prescription bottles and _Haribo_ candy wrappers decorate his dresser, and B’s dirty laundry is kicked into a pile at the foot of his bed. There is nothing hung on any of the walls.

B goes out.

Looking for what? “Clues,” he says, with a wink that suggests to L that he’s going to take MDMA and cruise through the Soho drag clubs until he’s glitter-slick and exhausted enough for his body to imitate sleep.

“Be safe,” L tells him, which could be interpreted as _wear a condom_ , but is really just intended to mean _don’t hurt anyone_.

There are many rules between them, numberless, but precise, drafted and redrafted through trial and error, which dictate what B is allowed to do and where he is allowed to do it and to whom and for how long and for what reasons. B can take certain drugs, but not others. B can work on cases by himself, but he is not allowed to approach or apprehend suspects without supervision. B can watch people die when their numbers are up, but he cannot kill them.

“But they’re gonna die anyway,” is his standard complaint.

L’s standard answer is, “It’s not about them.”

Once Mello’s asleep, L eats leftover baclava and snoops through his notes. Mostly he’s just copied, either verbatim or in general essence, what L and B have told him, adding certain personal addendums such as, _??????_ and, _!!!!!!_ at the ends of some lines, drawing arrows between others, scribbling dates into the margins. Occasionally there is a thought of his own mixed in, a _probably a lie_ , or, _the clean version?_ or _confirm with wedy._ It is strange for L to read his own words back to himself, elaborate in their ambiguity, but transparent in the depth of their grief.

It is hard not to eulogize Light. It is hard not to imagine him suspended in clouds somewhere, rolling his eyes at the uneasy peace L has assembled in his wake. _Boring_.

“That is not what it is like in our world,” Rem had said, but Rem is gone now, too.

 

—

 

There are things he won’t tell Mello about. Christmas, for example.

Kanzo Mogi, Hideki Ide, Shuichi Aizawa and Touta Matsuda went home to their loving families. The official disbandment of the Kira Investigation Taskforce was unceremonious, awkward, and prolonged by Soichiro’s inability to believe that Light’s absent consciousness was related to Kira’s sudden disappearance. Things were only settled by Misa’s confession. She spent the holidays in an institution where she wrote L’s first and last name again and again on scraps of art therapy paper. She told everything backwards and in stark blacks and whites, painting L as the villain and Light as his victim. L didn’t correct her; he locked his jaw shut while Soichiro sobbed and cursed him on the other end of an international phone call.

“I just want my son back, my son, my boy. Goddammit, what did you do to my boy?”

“I’m sorry,” L said, “for your loss.”

Wedy went back to the U.S. for Christmas. Her mother was a lesbian bus driver who has been steadily dying of colon cancer for the last two years. She lived in a trailer park in Arizona with her partner of more than a decade and refused to take any of her daughter’s so-called “blood money,” but was happy to cook her a roast when she came to visit. L learned most of that from meticulous investigation, less of it from late night murmurs.

Aiber went back to France to visit his children and their respective mothers. L assumed, but did not know, that Aiber was an absent but well-meaning father, one who sent money and gifts but forgot to call, coked out in hotel rooms on the other side of the world. He kissed him flatly on the mouth in the Narita parking lot and thanked him unspecifically before they boarded their respective planes, a two-sided apology unspoken but acknowledged between them.

The Yagamis probably spent the New Year in a hospital room. L didn’t look into it.

He went home like this: a twelve hour flight, inedible food and many, many small, tasteless coffees, then gray London sludge and the bulge of holiday commuters out of the city and into the country. The hills were white and unmarred by footsteps. The way that the air in Winchester smelled made L’s chest feel hollow. B grabbed his hand as they climbed out of the car to stare up at the house that raised them, looming and many windowed, but L shook him off. B grinned when he did that, and L didn’t wonder why.

Matt carried a suitcase full of Japanese souvenirs, and Mello carried himself much in the way that L remembered doing the first time he returned to the orphanage after an extended absence. The place looked sinister under all the tinsel, the cooing of tawny owls echoing from the branches around it. That house knew L’s sins before he had names for them. The walls rattled with the tinkling of bells.

Watari’s wheelchair was a pain to get up the gravel drive, and Roger came halfway down to greet them.

“You’ve a lot of work to make up,” he said to Mello, with all the joviality of Father Christmas.

“I’m dropping out,” Mello said.

“Me, too,” Matt said.

Roger’s smile just grew, his eyes creasing at their edges. This man, L thought, is older then he was.

He did not smile at B, but nodded warily, and welcomed him home. His old bedroom, he said, was full of boxes of old case files and cobwebs over cobwebs, but he was welcome to one of the spares in the east wing. B just sucked on his teeth, called Roger a “good old bastard,” and said he’d take the attic room, which no one said but everyone knew was L’s. In accordance with their formative British upbringing, they all avoided eye contact after that.

L’s childhood bedroom was nothing like any of his other many rooms. The transience of his lifestyle allowed for every trace of habitation to be wiped away by turndown service, scrubbed and bleached and reassembled into anonymity. He left rooms sticky with crumbs and warm with the recent thrum of machinery, but he was never in any place long enough to let parts of himself settle in. His bedroom at Wammy’s was different because it was constant. The attic was drafty, its ceilings slanted, the floorboards straining with the weight of all the junk within it. Old journals written in code lay in a heap beside a busted cassette player, which was stacked on a set of encyclopedias _F_ through _K_. A cello that L taught himself to play when he was thirteen leaned against a model of the human skeleton who was wearing a faded overcoat. The bookshelves bent in their middles under a mess of old favorites: Gogol, Jackson, Baldwin, Chandler, Kaftka, Yeats, a hundred paperback mysteries, two hundred true-crime VHS tapes. The first newspaper headlines to mention the mysterious detective known only by the moniker L were scotch-taped to the wall. A desk of old chemistry sets and unopened envelopes sloped sideways below a semi-circlular window, and beside it a defunct filing cabinet held the records of cases solved before Wammy’s went digital in the mid-90’s.

L had not been in that room since before the Kira case began over a year ago. The sheets were crisp and smelled like detergent, and the place had been given a cursory dusting in expectation—apprehension?—of his visit, but otherwise everything was as he had left it. He took off his coat and shoes and crawled into bed with his clothes on. B followed him in and stripped them off.

Lying in the swath of the cold duvet, warm breath against his face, L felt starkly with all of his senses that he was a child again and he was terrified. Up until then, pangs of memory had come and gone inconsistently, overwhelming in one moment, distant in the next. It was only in that place that he began to feel, with the same slow cognizance of someone waking up from a long dream, that he and B really were inextricable.

“What do I do?”

B smiled. He couldn’t see it but he felt the muscles in his face, heard the tight joy in his voice. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for you to ask me that.”

“Well, then you ought to have a good answer.”

At that point, L did not yet really know what he was going to do with B. Justice! suggested that he should punished, as did regular old justice with a lower-case j, and while there was no hope of effectively executing him, it was impossible to soundly argue that he didn’t deserve to be locked in a 9x9 cell for the rest of his natural life, or at least until modern society collapsed—whichever came first. L realized that to allow him the freedom to walk, to talk, to eat, play games, tell riddles, fly in planes and drive in cars, sing songs, breath fresh air, and celebrate Christmas was to casually breach the same ethical line which had tormented him for the entirety of his relationship with Light, but, in this case, he didn’t care.

In this case, he thought: I am a detective, not a judge, a jury, or an executioner. I have done my job.

This was not a legitimate line of reasoning, but a paltry justification. B was free because L needed someone to hold him upright. B was not really free at all, but captive in the same way he had always been. L held him between his hips and waited to hear his good answer.

“You wanna know the twist ending?” B said.

L shook his head. B told him anyway.

“I don’t have the answers. Never did. I have the questions and I have the right voice to ask them in, but I’ve only ever known when people are going to die—not how or why or where they go, or who they answer to. I know when you’re going to die. I see it every time I look at you, and if you wanna know the truth, it was the first thing I loved about you. Not the ridge of your nose or the sneer in your voice, but the shape of your numbers. There’s a message for me encoded into that date. But it’s not just for me, right?” He pulled on L’s wrists when he said that, exciting himself. “I’m not as special as I thought I was. I’m only half of something, and half of something else, but the two don’t make a whole. I don’t work right in this reality. My feet never feel like they’re touching the floor. Sometimes I see all the way through people’s heads to the horizons behind them.”

“B,” L said, because his voice was losing cadence and his grip was tightening.

“Hold on, I’m getting there. You’ve never had any fucking patience, have you?” He held his finger to L’s lips. “Shut-up, L. God. Shit. That feels good to say. Shut-up, L. Shut-up, L. More people should say that.”

L batted his hand away. “I take it back. I don’t want you to tell me what I should do anymore.”

“You should wait, and listen. Light Yagami didn’t die on November 24th, 2004, okay? Just remember that. Repeat it in your head if you have to.”

L’s chest clenched every time he heard that name spoken out loud. “I know he didn’t die. His body is living, and will go on living until I decide to stop paying for it.”

“He dies later. Do you understand what I’m saying? He dies later.”

L tried to blink but his eyes wouldn’t reopen. He held B’s hands is his hands and didn’t know what to do with them. “Stop it.”

He felt B’s silence against him for a long time. He felt it crawl out of bed and rustle through his belongings, kicking up mothballs and de-alphabetizing, picking locks and decoding private languages. B said, after a long time, when L was almost asleep, “I’ll repaint this room for you.”

L didn’t wonder what he meant.

 

—

 

There was a Christmas recital.

Look, there’s no reason to dodge around saying it: Wammy’s has gotten downright twee in Watari’s absence. In L’s day—B’s day, A’s day—they bought cadavers from the local university hospital, were taught to visually differentiate between chemical weapons based on the burn scars they left, and studied the psychological impact of torture.

“We still do those things,” Roger said, “but now we also have an optional orchestra.”

Watari complained, as L wheeled him down to his seat in the front row, that most children with IQ results above 140 have neither an interest in nor a temperment suited to detective work. This simple conceit had not yet occurred to anybody before A killed himself, and took a long time to emerge afterwards. L knew and had always known that Roger was a much less exacting person that Watari, concerned with the needs of the children more than their projected value in matters of international security, but he realized then how fully his role as the sole overseer of the orphanage had limited the severity with which its occupants were treated. They were no longer taught only criminology, psychology, ethical philosophy, law, and biology, but art history, and physics, and classics, and whatever other specializations they required, as long as they maintained a core focus on work that, in Roger’s words, “was concerned with the improvement of the human condition through the pursuit, acquisition, and punishment of those who do great and irreparable harm to their fellow man.”

Those words, unsurprisingly, made Watari strain to hold in an eye-roll.

L said, “That sounds much nicer.”

Watari said, “You would have hated it.”

L didn’t disagree. He parked him in the first row and then went to hide in the last. B, who was entertaining a group of ravenously curious adolescents, excused himself to join him as the strings started up. He was popular, while L was merely respected from an appropriate distance. They didn’t know for certain who B was, but they had theories, and most of them were either on the mark, or directly peripheral to it. Still, they loved his clownish decadence, his gratuitous descriptions of crimes he’d “solved,”—read: committed—and his caricaturization of L. L didn’t mind. Some strange brotherly sentiment made him like to see B liked.

Many of the children were truly good with their instruments. A blind fourteen-year-old named Linda was unbelievable on the violin. They played choral carols and sang in French.

Lowly, L said to B, “What did you mean by ‘he dies later’?”

“Just that.”

They both kept their eyes trained on the make-shift stage in the center of the dining hall.

“It’s irrelevant,” L said. “He’ll die eventually. Whenever I take him off of life-support, probably.”

“That’s not the point. Shinigami don’t have numbers. Or, at least, they don’t have numbers I can see, but I saw his and I know his, and I’m keeping them in a special compartment in my head which is adjacent to yours, but not too close.”

“But he wasn’t a Shinigami when you saw him. He was just a person. Whatever he is now, or wherever he is now….” L trailed off. No matter how many times he tried, he was never able to finish that sentence.

“All time is immediate. Death is constant. You’re dying right now in the future, and so is he. Me, I’m not so sure about, but that’s a different set of questions with a different set of answers.”

“Yes, thanks, Tralfamadore, but if that’s true, then why do dates change? You told me they can change.”

B opened his mouth, then closed it again. After a moment he said, “Parallel universes.”

L rolled his eyes, and started to argue, but B shushed him. “You’re missing the crescendo.”

L went quiet. He sat in his metal folding chair and listened to the music, and tried to love those children with their instruments, those children in the other folding chairs with theories and passions and, presumably, personalities, but he could not. He wasn’t built for that.

 

—

 

He only saw Near once over the course of his stay, and only because he finally came out of his room to inform L that he was leaving Wammy’s early to work as a detective under his own pseudonym, solving the crimes which L had neglected over the course of the Kira case.

“I do not intend any disrespect, but I am not comfortable sitting around waiting for you to die. It’s morbid and unproductive.”

L snorted. “Nicely put.”

The next day, he offered Mello the title, and the day after that, Mello answered him in the form of a forwarded e-mail from Wedy, who he had contacted some weeks before seeking what he called, “an apprenticeship.”

“I just, I don’t know. I have a lot of respect for her and the kind of work that she does. Not cooped up in hotel rooms, but out in the field, getting her hands dirty. I think that kind of work keeps your head above water. I’m sorry. I mean—I wouldn’t have asked her if I’d known you were going to… but she said yes, and I can’t just pull out because you’ve—I mean. At this point I don’t even think I’d make a very good successor. And it’s not like I really earned it. If you’re just giving me the title because Near dropped out, I don’t even think I want it. I have something I need to prove to myself, you know? I have to do it on my own.”

L did know. L did not fault him. L did not tell him that he had already intended to pick him. He just shrugged and said, “It’s alright. It’s a shitty job, anyway.”

 

—

 

When Mello wakes, L is on the phone with the chief security advisor of Pakistan. He holds up a finger. The coffee machine beeps, and Mello maintains unimpressed eye contact with L until he finishes his call.

“What?”

“You went through my shit.”

“Oh, yes. That. I did do that.”

“Christ, L. I mean, I don’t really care, because it’s all stuff you know, anyway, but it’s kind of the principle. You could have just asked.”

L hums and peripherally drafts an e-mail to the Anchorage police chief regarding the strangling case that he had solved two days ago but forgotten about until this morning. “Interesting that you were once tied up and forced to watch B kill and dismember two men with whom you were acquainted, yet you’re perfectly fond of him.”

Mello closes his eyes and holds them closed, eyelids twitching, and presumably counts backwards from ten. L watches him, impressed and belatedly sorry, as he opens them, pours himself a cup of coffee, and says nothing. Black, just like Wedy takes it.

“Look,” L starts, attempting to navigate an apology.

“Shit. Don’t. I get your point. It’s a logical fallacy—red herring—but you’re right, anyway. If I don’t want my shit messed with, I should probably just stay over at someone else’s flat.”

It’s not a very nice truth. L leans his chin again the flat of his palm, closes his laptop, and says, “Fish gotta swim.”

Mello doesn’t smile. “What did you think, anyway?”

“About your notes? Clear, concise, a bit under-developed at present, but then I expect that’s more my fault than it is yours. I suppose the thing I was looking for when reading them was some clue as to your motivations.”

“I told you. It’s,”—

“An assignment, yes, but why this case? Why not write about any other of the thousands of cases I’ve solved, or, better yet, one of the millions solved by others. Not only was the Kira case convoluted, drawn-out, and emotionally compromising, it intersected with so many other convoluted, drawn-out, and emotionally compromising cases that you’ll sooner have a novel than an essay.”

L’s phone buzzes. The rising daylight falls through the wide kitchen windows, striping the countertops and making Mello’s hair glint. He sips his coffee and tries to look grown-up. He says, “Then I’ll have a novel.”

 

—

 

Mello goes back to the two-bedroom in Greenwich that he shares with Matt, and L books two tickets to Port Moresby.

B comes home just after 10 AM, sticky, disheveled, and in full makeup: eyelashes clumped together, globs of pale glitter spread across his lids and rising up into his waxy, drawn-in eyebrows, a red that’s faded to pink smudged around his mouth. Though he dozes through B’s various excitable lectures on the inherently performative nature of gender, L sees him come more sharply into focus underneath a false eyelash, a wig, a negligee; costumes on top of costumes. All physical matter is equally incoherent to me, he’ll say. This body is a costume, he’ll say. I like that shade, he’ll say. What is that? _Diva_? Nice.

“How’s your Tok Pisin?” L asks him.

“Mediocre. Why? We going to Papua New Guinea?”

L nods. “Sex trafficking ring. Shouldn’t give me too much trouble, but given the number of victims and the amount of money involved, the Minster of Police has requested that I come in person. Or, at least, that Watari does.”

L stands in the doorway and watches B strip, staring at his own reflection and admiring his contoured cheekbones, the bruised color of his lips. The walls are white and tile is white and the width of the mirror makes the room appear bigger and brighter than it is. B turns the shower on and waits for it to steam.

“Well,” he says, “I guess we should put the old boy back together, then.”

“Do you remember where you left the trench coat?” L says. “I want to have it dry-cleaned.”

“Closet floor. Not here, the closet at the other flat. It’s pretty badly bloodstained, though. You should probably just buy me another.”

L rolls his eyes and slumps against the doorframe. His nerves chafe with the buzz of caffeine, and he should have just slept, but he hadn’t wanted to miss this moment: B in the shower, voice echoing against the tile. Mornings like this have never happened to people like them before; they are still a small revelation.

L says, “I’ve always suspected you were just after me for my money.”

“Obviously. I’m sucking up so that you’ll put me in your will, but after that?” He whistles, shrill and weird. “Boy howdy. Watch your back. Watch your front.”

L goes back into his room and tries to fall asleep with his head at the foot of the bed and his feet on the pillow, listening to B’s best impressions of Freddie Mercury—helpfully dramatized by the bathroom’s acoustics— and repeating to himself the testimonies given by two of the women who had escaped the trafficking ring he’s preparing to dismantle. They put you in a room without windows, they’d said. A very small room, with a lot of other girls, and sometimes young boys. L imagines this room. L imagines what Kira would have done with these testimonies. He doesn’t miss the fire or the brimstone, but it still sends a tingle down his spine.

It’s like knowing that God isn’t real, but wishing that he was.

He wakes after an undisclosed amount of time—not very long, the depth of the shadows is the same—to feel B settling in behind him, chest fitting to his spine, chin to his shoulder. His skin is warm and clammy, hair wrapped up in a towel. His body doesn’t really know how to sleep, but he’s gotten good at pretending.

“What you’re doing,” he murmurs into the back of L’s neck, “is uncharacteristically brave.”

L huffs a mute, exhausted laugh. “Always the backhanded compliment.”

“You like the back of my hand.” He runs his fingers to the roots of L’s hair and tugs on his scalp, kisses his earlobe. “I thought for sure you’d tell Mihael to politely fuck off.”

“I almost did. But it occurred to me that the Kira case doesn’t have a file—not a complete one, anyway, and I have neither the time not the inclination to write one up. I suppose I just realized that I’ll probably want it on record. I’ll want to go back and read it when enough time has passed. I don’t want to forget….”

He doesn’t say _him_ , but he doesn’t have to.

“Anyway, I’m running away now, aren’t I? Our flight leaves at 8 tonight. How’s that for characteristic?”

“Oh, good. I was about to check for your ass for wires.”

“Please. Please let the robot theory die.”

“The Robot Theory,” B says, and he always says it like that, title case implicit, “is well supported, soundly argued on both sides, and—like me—it will never, ever die.”

 

—

 

The text he sends to Mello’s cellphone—which he pays for, just like his apartment and his clothes and his groceries—reads like this:

_Leaving town for a case. Further interviews are to be deferred until such time as I return. Yes, I took B with me. No, you can’t call. In the meantime, ask Wedy to fill in what blanks she can, and draft some appropriately scrutinizing questions. Should be back within the week._

He adds, _Good luck with your studies_ , in an attempt to be chummy, but hates how false and unnecessary it looks, and changes the _, Good luck with_ , to, _Focus on your_ , before sending it off.

 

—

 

L works through the flight. B racks up a tab of cocktails and unnecessary amenities, neck-pillows and sleep masks and noise-canceling headphones, which he tries on and discards. He’s spending as much money as he can because he’s annoyed that L still won’t let him fly the private plane. L’s not very good at drawing the line, but it’s got to go somewhere.

“Watari flies the plane,” B had insisted. “It’s part of his job.”

“You’re not Watari, not really. You’re just… back-up.”

B could have blacked his eye for that, and didn’t, and so L lets him buy one of everything from _Skymall_ , because it’s the easiest way to relieve his guilt. B saves him his maraschino cherries and L knots the stems with his tongue. They’ve gotten good at this.

 

—

 

At first, they were not.

The weeks spent at Wammy’s preceding and following Christmas were hellish in their familiarity. For the first several days, L slept as much as he could, ate sparingly, and avoided contact with the children. He was grieving, and all members of the Wammy’s House faculty either understood this, or had been instructed to behave as if they did. No one asked anything of him, and he asked for nothing.

B was, is, and has always been, of course: an exception. Rephrased, for dramatic effect: a problem.

The less L responded, the more B spoke to him. The greater the disinterest L expressed in his theories on the birth-death-ressurection cycle, or the nature of the Shinigami world, or the congruence of the so-called Upstairsmen with the Old Testament angels, the more insistently he relayed them. This did not cure L of his misery, but served to distract him into rage. Their first public fight came four days after their arrival, took place in the south garden, ended with B’s wrist momentarily sprained, left eye and lower jaw momentarily swollen, and sent Watari and Roger into a semi-audible, hours-long argument in Roger’s office, which had children ages six through seventeen stopping by to press their ears to the door at consistent intervals. L sustained only trivial injuries, but they healed much more slowly. He resented B, not only for his superhuman—subhuman?—abilities, but also for his mercy.

They sat on twin cots in the nurse’s office, as they always had. The olfactory stimulation was almost overwhelming, and every drop of antiseptic and spritz of air freshener brought back into the present a world that was supposed to have ended in apocalypse. 1997 through 2004 blurred away.

“I think this is the first time that I’ve wholly understood how easy it would be for you to kill me,” L said to B.

B blinked slowly, like a cat. “In one sense.”

“I mean, if you chose.”

“Ah, yes. Yes. If I chose.” He smiled ironically. _Good joke, motherfucker_.

After that, L woke from one dream and entered another. He read the New Testament in Greek, and the Old Testament in Hebrew. He ordered rare copies of the apocrypha and antilegomena from book shops through-out the world, combed the Qur’an and Hadith for every mention of angels, and cross-referenced himself into the depths of classical Japanese literature for any and all references to Shinigami. B had not given him hope, but rather a violent skeptical energy which desired only to see his lack of hope proven valid. Nothing could bring Light back, L knew, but he was making damn sure of it, anyway.

While he worked, B brought him tea and gingersnaps, dug the pads of his thumbs into his shoulder blades, read over his notes and corrected his Arabic. L, by turns, ignored him, batted him off, or leaned into him. When a twelve-year-old boy’s pet rabbit disappeared, L turned a blind eye. When a sixteen-year-old of unspecified gender started throwing around such patented B-isms as hadn’t been heard in the Wammy’s dining hall since the mid-90’s, like, “pretty baby,” and, “darling, listen,” L didn’t see what the big deal was.

When Watari approached him, and said, “I don’t suppose you’ve considered directing any of this manic investigatory energy toward one of the cases I’ve forwarded to you?” L just blinked.

Then he said, “You have a whole institution dedicated to producing detectives in my image, and you can’t find a single person who’d be willing or able to shoulder a bit of grunt work during my very necessary sabbatical?” He licked his thumb and turned a tissue-thin page of Psalm 8. “Forward them to Near.”

“Near,” Watari said, rolling into the seat opposite L, “has made arrangements with a private human rights organization in the U.S., and is uninterested in further association with the L brand. He and I discussed it at length before he spoke with you. He believes that your handling of the Kira case, as well as a few of the minor scandals from the past few years—the affair in Moldova, in particular—have associated with your name a level of public distrust and police resentment which would be inconvenient to operate under.”

He said this all very plainly and pleasantly. L has, by turns, resented and revered Quillsh Wammy, but he has never doubted his unwavering and impartial devotion to the Greater Good.*

(*Watari’s Greater Good, while not synonymous with Light’s Justice, is comparable in its vigor and its lawlessness.)

L did not, however, at present, care.

“I don’t see why that means he can’t have my cases. You want them solved, don’t you?”

“I do not,” Watari said, “intend to surrender a lifetime’s worth of work, capital, and belief to an idealistic fourteen-year-old simply based on your whim."

“Don’t forget blood, sweat, and tears.” L smiled tightly even though he knew he was being unfair. He liked to win arguments by whatever means, and if he wasn’t having arguments he liked to make them. “Find someone else. I’ll return to my caseload at such time as I am able.”

“L.”

“What? You have an entire system of failsafes in place to accommodate the organization in the event of my death, but no one ever thought about what would be done if I one day decided I just didn’t want to do it anymore? That seems like a grievous oversight.”

“The work is done not because we want to do it,” Watari began.

“ _But because someone has to._ Yes, thanks. I remember. Why don’t you ask Beyond? The B does stand for Back-up, after all.”

Watari coughed for effect. “Believe it or not, I already broached the subject with him.”

That, at last, made L look up from his research. “And?”

“He intimated a disinterest in having anything of yours if he was being given it, rather than usurping it out from under you. I believe his exact words were, ‘I go where he goes, and right now we’re going to hell.’ Heartfelt, I’m sure, if not a bit overwrought.”

L’s mouth twitched at its corners. “I believe this is an appropriate time to point out that you did raise both of us.”

“You raised one another. It was under my authority that you were allowed to do so, and, if we’re to assign blame, I may deserve plenty, but don’t be coy. It was not chiefly my influence that made B who he is, but yours.”

“Temperamentally, perhaps. But he’s—he isn’t human. Whatever’s wrong has been wrong since birth. I may have exacerbated his defects, but I don’t know what else you were expecting, releasing a horror-movie monster onto an eight-year-old.”

“You did remarkably well, under the circumstances.” Watari’s voice was absent of apology.

L’s facial muscles hurt from holding so still. “Yes. Thanks.”

“So, I do hope that you’re fully aware of the danger of what you’re doing now.”

L blinked. “What? Letting him run amuck through five acres of secluded countryside, instead of trying, once again, to lock him up in a prison from which we both know he will eventually escape? I’m doing the best that I can with the realties facing me.”

“B,” Watari said, “has wanted only one thing since I took him out of that children’s hospital in Kokubunji and brought him here, and that is your attention. Now that you are finally giving it to him, without bargaining for anything in return, you have surrendered the only mechanism through which you or I have ever been able to control him.”

L opened his mouth, closed it, and shook his head. He stood up, walked the length of the bookshelf, and doubled-back, twice as angry. “I see. So, we’ve been controlling him all this time. Remind me again, whose idea were the LA murders? How about the mess in Reykjavik? Was that you, or I, or Roger? I seem to have forgotten which of B’s keepers was responsible for which of his murder sprees.”

“There have been hiccups,” Watari admitted, flatly, “but up until this point he has been easy to keep track of, because his motivations have been consistent.”

“He was _miserable_ ,” L said, with vehemence he didn’t want. “He was tortured by a constant feeling of displacement, by _visions_ that you and I cannot imagine, or perhaps even comprehend, and he experimented with death for the purpose of gaining insight into his place in the order of things, not simply for my attention. If you cannot understand him as anything other than a copy of myself, then you don’t have any business advising me as to how he ought to be dealt with.”

L was breathing too hard and talking too fast. Watari sat still with his hands folded.

“He’s killed and mutilated Mosby.”

L had a quick and tidy panic attack. “Who?”

“Hermes’s rabbit.”

“Oh.”

Oh. For fuck’s sake.

 

—

 

L took B out into the woods behind Wammy’s House and shot him.

He did not necessarily intend to do so—the gun was a safety measure, the location chosen for the privacy it afforded on grounds otherwise littered with secret passageways and peepholes—but B said Light’s name too many times in too short a span of minutes and L panicked. In the interim before he woke up, L fastened B’s wrists with zip-ties and secured him to a tree. B’s wounds healed before his eyes, the bullet pushing itself out like time wound backwards.

The first thing he asked B when he woke up was whether or not he could do experiments on him.

B’s response, quick and conditioned, was, “Anything.”

That made L sad in a way he will never have words for. “Why did you kill that kid’s pet, B?”

“Animals in cages always look so lonely. I want to set them free.”

“You know better.”

“Better than what?”

L rolled his eyes. He set the gun down so he wouldn’t be tempted. The snow had hardened to ice under two day’s worth of sleet and the forest was quiet in the way that a place can only be in winter. It thrummed with the slow breaths of hibernating animals.

“Don’t play games,” he said to B. “Don’t make me chase you. Just answer my questions, and I’ll answers yours.”

B thought about it. He bit the inside of his cheek and shimmied into a sitting position. “Okay, angel. Why did you shoot me?”

L tucked his knees up to his chin and swallowed. “I was afraid. I’m afraid of you. You do realize that, don’t you? You’re the only person who truly knows me, and you’re never going to die. You must understand why that’s terrifying.”

“You must understand how terrifying it is for me to know that you _are_ going to die. To know exactly when.” He cocked his head to one side. His voiced hummed with familiar desperation. “I want to crawl backwards in time. I want to go back to the house when it was empty. Just the three of us.”

That was hard for L to hear. “Do you miss A?” he asked, and wondered why he never had before.

B shrugged. “I watched him kill himself. I never told you that. He invited me—told me where and knew he didn’t have to tell me when, and I went and I watched and I didn’t try to stop him. I knew I couldn’t, but I’ve always wondered if he did, or if he’d wanted me to try. Dates change, but I can’t change them. There’s a closed system at work here, but I’m not part of it. You have to keep a tight hold on me or I’ll float up past the atmosphere.”

L thought about reaching for him, but didn’t. “Watari thinks,”—

“That by actually admitting that you care about me, you’ve surrendered your only means of keeping me under your thumb? Yes, I know. You should watch what you say. The rooms are listening.” He wiggled his eyebrows with less vigor than usual. He looked tired and cold.

“Well, is he right?”

B’s expression stuttered, then stilled. “He doesn’t know what you and I know.”

“No, he doesn’t. But he does have a point. If you decided you wanted to kill every person on these grounds—excluding or including me; it’s irrelevant—then I would be powerless to stop you. You’re twice as strong as anyone I’ve ever met, three times as smart as most people, and you’re invincible. You’d be an extremely valuable asset in the field, but also a highly unpredictable, potentially dangerous variable. At this point, I honestly don’t know what I should do with you.”

“Take me home, put me on a leash, give me bones to chew on.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being metaphorical, or just kinky.”

“Bit of both. What do you _want_ to do with me?”

L frowned. He picked the gun up, then put it down again. He wished he had something to do with his hands or his mouth. Gummy worms, lemon suckers, tootsie pops. He said, eventually, “If the time I spent in Tokyo over the last year taught me anything, it’s that the things that I want are neither ethical nor possible.”

B didn’t take that with the severity L intended. He shrugged, and said, “Find a balance. Make it work.”

And L—he did that.

 

—

 

He started by getting B a therapist.

Every syndicate which powers the operations of the detective known as L, including Wammy’s House Orphanage and all associated parties, is, above all, a secret. While this is why the organization was best equipped to combat Kira, it is also the reason that, historically, no mental health professionals have ever been of any use to its members. When one’s neuroses, thoughts, and day-to-day experiences are forbidden to be discussed with outsiders, there is very little to talk about during talk-therapy.

This changed in 2002. Grady Tate—the only son of Edmund Tate, who served as the groundskeeper for Wammy’s House from its founding in 1976 until his retirement in 1997—did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps. His younger sister, Emily, took on the role of groundskeeper instead, contrary to the wishes of their parents, and Grady went to university. Although he was raised, and sometimes educated, among a population of geniuses from his early childhood onward, he was not one himself, and he did not achieve academic distinction at King’s College. He did, however, fall in love.

Ruth Adeyemi was pursing her doctorate at the time that they met, had completed it by the time that they married, and had a psychology practice established in London at the point when Grady finally brought her home to meet his extensive, adopted, and intellectually incomparable family. L remembered interviewing her over the phone as a formality to get her enough clearance to even come around for dinner. He had never met her in person until the day that he brought B to her office in Shoreditch.

She was tall, Nigerian-British, fluent in four languages, and extremely professional. She did not indicate that she was aware of L’s identity until he asked, at which point she nodded, expressed her appreciation for the services he had rendered to the world at large, and didn’t elaborate.

“Oh, come on,” L said, “I’m sure Grady has told you plenty of awful things about me.”

Dr. Adeyemi smiled with her eyes, but not her mouth, and nodded towards B. “I believe this is his session, not yours.”

“Oh, I’ve told him that I refuse to be psychoanalyzed without him. You start taking me apart, and bits of him are going to come loose, too. We’re interdependent in that way. Like siamese twins, except instead of being connected at the shoulder, it’s at the soul.”

L rolled his eyes and slumped lower into the excessively comfortable chair. “He’s joking. Well, he’s not, but please treat him like he is. I’m here in the capacity of overseer only, until such time as I’m comfortable leaving him alone with you.” He pulled one of the lollipops out of the bowl set on the glass table between his chair and B’s—oh, how nice, cotton candy flavor—unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth. “Pretend as if I’m not even here.”

Dr. Adeyemi studied him for a moment, wrote something down, and then did as he asked, turning her attention solely to B.

“If I’m to assume that you’re being serious—and I’d liked to be able to do so, Beyond—then I’ll take it that you believe literally in the soul. Is that correct?”

“Sure is, Doc.”

“And what is it, to you?”

“You mean, what does it look like?”

“If that’s how you’d like to take the question, then, yes. Start there.”

“Well, it’s, sort of. Oily? And bright and glowing. Greenish. It looks kind of like an opal, but greener, and huge, and translucent. It floats in the center of my chest and sometimes it comes out late at night while I’m not sleeping and it—you’re going to laugh at this,”—

“I promise you, I won’t.”

“It bites my nose. The tip of my fucking nose. Bullshit, huh?”

L snorted. Dr. Adeyemi didn’t shoot him the deprecating look that he wanted her to, but wrote something down in her notes again.

“Is this only your soul, or do other people’s look the same, too?”

“Other people’s? I don’t see them, most of the time. I mean, I have seen a few. Pink and squiggly, like intestines, or clean and plain and white as a tablecloth. But most people keep them locked up tight inside themselves, you know?”

“How about L’s?” Dr. Adeyemi said. “Have you seen it?”

B laughed, slow and riveting. “Oh, Doc, he’s not gonna like this.”

“That shouldn’t discourage you from being honest. This is a safe space.” She didn’t give L any of the pointed looks that her voice implied. Her manner was so poised and purposeful that it almost bothered him.

“Well, it’s real simple,” B said. “L’s soul is part of mine—or mine is part of his. They’re attached somehow, anyway. His is the tooth part of mine. His is the part that bites me.”

Dr. Adeyemi nodded, wrote something down, and then asked, “Would you say that you resent L?”

For every look she didn’t give L, B gave him two, side-long and scanning, at once eager to please and excited to abuse. There was a lot that he could say and a lot that L would let him, crunching his lollipop and holding his tongue.

Instead, perhaps out of some misguided fealty, B said, “I guess that you think I’m being symbolic? Like, this is a metaphor for some deeply-rooted childhood trauma shit? Which is fine analysis. But I want you to know up front that everything I tell you is true. I want you to know that, because it’s scarier that way. Like how a ghost story is only really good when it makes you believe, if for only a few seconds and with only the hairs on the back of your neck, that there really is a ghost out there, and it knows about you. I need you to be,” he said, lips digging out space around the words, “scared.”

It made L’s pulse speed up to hear him talk like that. He could have sworn Dr. Adeyemi noticed that and made a note about it.

“Do you like scaring people, Beyond?”

He sniffed. “I like fear. It’s—heavy, and it’s the easiest one to learn. When I was a little kid—and listen, L will love this; he pretends he doesn’t care about my life before Wammy’s but he’s honestly ravenously curious—when I was really little, maybe four, I lived with a foster family in Ikebukuro, and this couple—in their early thirties, these long-haired bohemian types, both of them librarians, both of them specialists in the occult—had a parrot. An african grey, named Mr. Bird. Fucking hippies, right? And Mr. Bird was the fucking worst. He was truly godawful. He’d imitate the telephone and the doorbell all the time, and he’d do it so well that you’d have to check just to make sure. He’d do my foster father’s voice perfectly, the way it would break when he’d scream at my foster mother. ‘Hiroko,’ Mr. Bird would yell, ‘Hiroko, listen to me!’ And he’d hide around corners and behind doors, and then jump out and scare you so that you’d scream at the top of your lungs, and then he’d flap around imitating your screams. He just wanted to learn new sounds. That’s how I think of myself. Like a monster who hides around corners and jumps out just to learn news sounds.”

L stuck another lollipop in his mouth as soon as he finished the first.

Dr. Adeyemi said, “So, you feel as if you don’t come by human emotions naturally, but that you have to imitate them?”

“I was told,” B said, “that you’d read my file.”

“I have.”

“And did you believe what you read?”

“What I believe is irrelevant. My intention is not to prove or disprove your perceptions, but to help you healthily integrate them into your life.”

B shook his head. “That doesn’t work for me. Do you have a knife?”

L took this as his cue to intervene. “B, don’t. Just answer her questions as she asks them.”

“Shhh, babycakes. We’re pretending you’re not here.” He shifted in his chair. “Well, what about a letter opener?”

“I have a letter opener,” Dr. Adeyemi said, “but I’m not going to give it to you. I don’t need you to demonstrate anything to me. In fact, I would prefer that you didn’t. Self-harm is self-harm, no matter how long it takes or doesn’t take you to heal from it.”

B smiled wrong, licking his teeth one by one. “I need you understand—not just read, but _understand_ —that I’m not human.”

“B,” L said.

“Half,” Dr. Adeyemi said.

“What?”

“According to your file, you’re half. Perhaps the exact percentage is disputed, but the facts as they were presented to me are that you are, at least in part, human. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here, on this planet. You wouldn’t be able to operate at all in this world, but you seem to manage it, if not in the same way that everyone else does. My job is not to make people happy, or to improve them, but to help them understand themselves, and to cope with the world as healthily as they are able to. If you want to be treated as a monster, you are welcome to ask L to take you to monster therapy. In here, I’m going to treat you as a human being. That’s just the only species that I’m equipped to work with.”

B’s eyes got very wide, and he leaned forward in his chair. L watched him bite his lip and dig his fingernails into his palms and wondered if this had been a mistake.

“There’s no such thing as monster therapy,” he said. “I checked.”

They both ignored him.

“You’re not scared of me, then?”

“No, Beyond.”

B smiled so wide that it split his face.

 

—

 

When they land in Port Moresby, L checks into the hotel suite, orders everything off of the room service dessert menu, and starts setting up the severs. B puts on the new trench coat—starched gray, with shiny black buttons—and the old hat, kisses L on the temple, and leaves to pick up the rental car and put in an appearance at the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. He’ll set up the laptop and the projector, L will speak through the voice modulator, and things will go as they should.

They’ve done this enough times that they are good at it, though L doubts that it will ever be as seamless as it once as. The Watari that invented Watari has hung up his hat and retired to the countryside, and L and B are all that is left of the Greater Good. They are all that is left of Justice, and Justice!, and, yes, even justice.

They get to work.

 

—

 

L didn’t like how well B took to Dr. Adeyemi, but he understood the emotion as simple jealousy, and shelved it. He started the second session by declaring his intention to leave them alone and supervise from behind the cameras, but she told him, in the deft and doubtless way that got under his skin, that she would prefer it if he remained. She not only had lollipops this time, but jelly babies, too.

“I want to start off by returning to a question from last week that you deflected at the time. Is that alright?”

B nodded. He was lolling sideways in his chair, and L knew that he was eager to be disassembled.

“Great. Then I’ll ask once more: do you resent L?”

That made B absolutely giddy. “You trying to get under my skin, Doc, or his?”

L was wondering the same thing, but he just shoved a handful of jelly babies in his mouth.

“This is about you, Beyond. From what I can tell, a lot of your pain is clustered around your relationship to him. Is that incorrect?”

“No, it’s right on the mark. But I like pain, so it’s kind of irrelevant.”

“Why do you think it is that you like pain?”

B shrugged. “If I’m supposed to be pretending that I’m a person, then my answer can’t be that it’s just bred into me, from Mommy or Daddy or whatever shit-lord put their god parts on or in a human, can it?”

“I don’t want you to pretend. I want you to embrace your humanity. It might be that your preferences are determined biologically, but that perception assigns a fully external locus of control. I find it strange that someone whose actions have been so highly individualistic and self determined is so eager to believe that what they feel is governed by outside forces. Have you ever considered that your pain could be a choice, and not a necessity?”

B shook his head very quickly. “Pain is constant. Pain is inherent.”

Dr. Adeyemi wrote something down. “Returning to my original question, which you seem unable to answer at this point,”—

“Yes,” B said, with an overdramatized eye roll, “I resent L. Of course I resent L. If you read the file—if you spoke to him for five minutes—if you ever once looked at me—you would know. It’s so obvious it doesn’t need to be said. It’s boring, and irrelevant. I want to talk about pain some more.”

“We are talking about pain.”

B laughed then, high and loud, and it scraped along the back of L’s skull. He said, “I really don’t think I should be present for this.”

B said, “Hey, Doc, do you think I could borrow that letter opener now?”

“No, Beyond. Do you think you could tell me a few of the reasons that you resent L?”

L got up and walked to the door. He knew there were reasons that he never went to therapy, and this is was just one of them. Everything was sloping up inside of him, and the whir of the ceiling fan couldn’t keep the room from getting red hot. He put his hand on the doorknob as B said, “Well, he traumatized me in my early childhood, for one thing.”

L’s limbs stopped working. He brain was sending impulses to his nerves but they weren’t getting there. All his fingers could do was tighten and relax, tighten and relax. “I,” he said, in a voice he didn’t recognize or like, “traumatized _you_?” He spun around without meaning to. “You _ruined_ me.”

B was looking at him with hungry fear. He shook his head, and said, “No, baby, I made you gold.”

Dr. Adeyemi wrote something down in her notes, and L turned on her. “Stop. Stop it. This is not what I’m paying you for. You are not my doctor, you’re his. I’m not here to have couple’s counseling.”

“Oh,” B said. “Oh, I like that phrase.”

“Just—shut-up.”

“B told me,” Dr. Adeyemi said, even-tempered as ever, “that the two of you are connected at the soul.”

“B is _insane_.”

“Is he? That’s one of the questions we’re trying to answer.”

“No, I have the answer. He’s fucking certifiable. He _is_ a monster, and treating him like he’s not one isn’t going to help anybody.” L’s voice was shaking and he didn’t know how that had happened.

“We put monsters in cages,” Dr. Adeyemi said. “We bring people to therapy when we love them, and want to help them.”

That word— _love_ —made L’s chest constrict, and when he looked at B he could see past his white t-shirt, past his skin and ribs, could see his chest constricting, too, and he thought then that maybe couple’s counseling was exactly what they needed, that to try to diagnose them individually was the entire problem. He felt his way backwards in time, to the cold stream and their feet covered in mud, trying to drown each other, trying to _drown each other_ for a game. It was hard to keep track of who traumatized who.

“Will you have a seat, L?” Dr. Adeyemi asked him.

And he did.

 

—

 

The best way to take down the ring is to infiltrate it as directly and quickly as possible, so they dress B in a Lanvin suit, wash his hair and tie it back in a ponytail, and put him in a pair of suede Venetian loafers. L calls Aiber to ask what kind of cologne he suggests.

“Just, in general?”

“Yes, if one was generally the kind of man to want to invest in and expand an already well-established sex trafficking ring.”

“Wow. I—think I’m offended? But I can definitely name a few, so I guess you came to the right place. I’ll send you a list.”

“Thank you. I’ll wire you an appropriate amount of compensation for your time.”

“You mean these two minutes? I’ll cut you a deal and give them to you for free, if you tell me how you’ve been doing.”

“What? I’m fine. I’m still sending you the money.”

“You’re fine? That’s it?”

“Well, would you believe me if I told you I was doing well? That I was happier and more well-adjusted than I’ve ever been?”

B is sitting on the bathroom counter, between two vast and violently white sinks, giving himself a pedicure—“I’m just trying to get in character, okay?”—and he doesn’t look up when L says that, but his lip hitches and he scrubs his foot harder.

“No,” Aiber says, from the other end of the line, “I wouldn’t.”

L smiles softly. “It’s nice hearing your voice, Aiber.”

“Yours, too, you heartless bastard.”

“Send that list within the hour, alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. Give my regards to your bloodhound.”

B woofs and howls. He does a pretty damned good impression, panting and all, though L’s not sure Aiber will be able to hear him through the phone.

He says, “I will,” and hangs up.

 

—

 

B picked up the phrase _couple’s counseling_ and wouldn’t put it down. L fought it for a little while, and then resigned himself to it. He fought Dr. Adeyemi for longer, but when she began asking about it in a session, he realized that she made him so uncomfortable because he didn’t like to speak to people who managed their outward image as impeccably as he did, that he instantly suspected them of something even when there was no crime that was apparent, and that his dislike of her self-control was linked to his fear of losing his own.

“Wow,” he said to her once. “You’re extremely good at your job.”

“From what I understand, so are you.”

Around these weekly appointments, L began to take on cases again, and eventually began to take B on with him. During one particularly difficult string of serial murders, they had three sessions in one week. After a while, they pulled back to only having one a month. L couldn’t track the changes day by day, but he would notice them suddenly after enough time had passed. He and B began to stand differently around one another—less like each other’s guards, more like friends; “Boyfriends,” B said, and laughed and laughed—and they started to look less and less alike. B grew his hair out and got a nose ring. He didn’t always shave. He started buying clothes that looked good on him, sometimes women’s clothes. He joined the _Sephora_ loyalty program, and received a disgusting amount of catalogs in the mail at L’s various addresses. They had weird sex, and sometimes they had normal sex, and sometimes they had no sex at all.

They disentangled slowly, and relearned each other as adults. B was still not wholly human, and L was but wasn’t any good at it, but they made their best efforts. There were always arguments to have, and Dr. Adeyemi was always there to referee them.

“I don’t see how going on an arbitrary, alliteration-minded killing spree for the purpose of gaining my attention is at all comparable to the lives that I have been unable to avoid sacrificing in my line of work.”

“Oh, this is so funny. I wish you could hear yourself. You sound like _him_.”

“Don’t. B—please.”

“May I ask who _he_ is?” Dr. Adeyemi said.

“No,” L said, “you may not.”

They worked through a hundred shared and individual wounds, but they never, ever touched Light Yagami, or the Kira case. L assumed that Dr. Adeyemi had guessed, at least in part, the type of deity that they had reference to when they got into screaming arguments about God, Kami, whatever the pseudonym of the moment was. L knew B was being demure out of loyalty, and he showed his appreciation in the depths of the night, with fingers against bones.

One morning, B got home from a party that left him glittering drunk and queasy, crawled into bed beside L and his mess of case files, and said, “I think I’m becoming a better person.”

L said, “You said _person_ ,” and smiled.

 

—

 

The mic is in B’s mouth, capped against one of his molars, but they find it anyway, tie him to a chair, and torture him for information. It’s alright, there’s another one in the toe of his shoe. L hears the whole thing loud and clear—the goading, the mockery, the slap of flesh and B’s dramatized screams of agony. They address him in English, but speak to one another in Tok Pisin, and L’s rusty enough to have to bounce the recording to a frantic deputy at the Constabulary who lets him know when they have enough with which to convict. It goes on longer than L would prefer, and at some point the men torturing B seem to realize that he is healing more quickly than he should be, because one tells the other to, _“Hold the knife in.”_

It’s to the sound of B’s false pleas for mercy that L finally gets the okay from over the headset, and he lands the helicopter on top of the building as quickly as he can. They’re holding B on the third floor from the top, and he takes the stairs two at a time, one gun clenched in his hand, another holstered under his arm. It’s been a while, and he is that the point in his psychological healing— _ha_ —that he is able to admit to himself that he’s missed this.

He knocks on the bolted door, puts his gun to the head of the man who answers it, and says, “Hi.”

The other man, kneeled by the chair to which B is strapped, blood-soaked and mottled by the weird ripples of his regenerative power, stands and shoots immediately, missing L but hitting his partner in the clavicle. L dodges around him and shoots back, striking dead center and knocking him flat.

“We good?” B asks.

L nods, quickly, and moves to untie him, craning back to check that the other man hasn’t moved and finding that he isn’t there at all. He hears the shots but doesn’t feel them, because B throws himself, chair and all, into the line of fire, taking one, two, three, four bullets that were meant for L, hitting the floor with a smash that leaves his chair a scrap-heap, and letting the fifth graze L’s arm as he ducks down. From behind the crumpled mess of open wounds that B has become, L aims, lands a headshot on the man that shot him, and says, “Ow.”

B, hacking hard and ugly with damage, shrugs out of the ropes and turns over on his hands and knees. He hasn’t been hit anywhere vital enough to stop his pulse, even for a short time, but he’s struggling not to collapse, wheezing joltily.

“Lungs?” L asks.

B nods, then spits out a bullet, gasping hard. “Ugh. Christ. That’s better.”

“Come on,” L says, pulling him up. He can hear the clatter of footsteps from down the hallway and his head is thrumming with adrenaline. He doesn’t think his arm was badly hit but knows if he looks he’ll feel it more, so he doesn’t. “Come on, I’ve got you.”

He stumbles, pulling B to his feet. The room twists and the blood pulses in his ears and he needs to get up three flights of stairs _right now_.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you do,” B says, and slings L’s arm over his shoulder, dragging him toward the door.

They goad each other along, battered and dizzy, but as B’s wounds close up and L’s get worse it becomes less of a three-legged race and more of a piggy-back ride, and by the time they’re on the roof—the pound of shoes and the clamor of voices not far behind—B practically has to load him into the helicopter like a piece of cargo. There’s a full first-aid kit, and B opens it up first thing, as L goes for the control panel. He takes off while B staunches the bleeding from his arm, and they barely avoid a hail of gunfire as they depart against the city skyline, tucking themselves into the deep dark of the southern winter.

 

—

 

Sometimes they had sessions alone.

B would request them occasionally, and L’s theory that he had a crush on Dr. Adeyemi and wanted to schmooze her by himself was only bolstered by the irate voicemails that Grady sometimes left him after such sessions, though L considered it harmless; a characteristic, almost childlike infatuation. L rarely had any, but that day they were alone. B was having a “spa day” with Wedy. L assumed that meant they were having sex, but made no effort to confirm it.

“Yes, he was fourteen. I was sixteen. That was just—that wasn’t the first time, really, but it was the first time it was wholly sexual and not just exploratory. There was an innocence to it before that, in some ways. It was unknowing and clumsy. That time, it wasn’t. I know that I must seem awfully predatory, being two years older and—treating him, the way I did, otherwise. But I never initiated anything. He always….”

Dr. Adeyemi nodded, and wrote something down. L had gotten to like when she did that.

“You said that he would crawl into your bed, or hide under it. That he would climb in your windows at night. It doesn’t seem to me that you were the aggressor in that situation, but perhaps you feel that you were? Because of your age, and your position of esteem at the orphanage?”

L shrugged. “I admit, at the time, I thought that I was suffering a severe injustice. I found the mere existence of A and B insulting, and wanted nothing to do with either of them for as long as I could manage to. A was fine with that, for the most part. He was sensible. He wasn’t an intuitive person, would have made an awful detective—he liked maths and science, chemistry, biology. Certainly, there would have been a place for him in the organization, but not at the top. For the first five months, before B arrived, when it was just A and I, we rarely, if ever, spoke. I think he was afraid of me. I guess I wanted him to be. I wanted B to be afraid of me, also, but—well, I suppose you can guess the plot twist?”

“You were afraid of him?”

“Terrified. Aghast. He knew my name, for one thing, which I chocked up to some deductive ingenuity far beyond—pardon the pun—my capabilities. It wasn’t his strangeness or his ravenous desire for my attention that scared me. That was alright. I was eight but I’d already seen… things that eight year olds ought not see. It was his brain. I thought he was smarter than me and that was extremely frightening. I’d never known anyone who could even approach me, intellectually, at that point. Now that I think about it, he probably spared me a god complex. He proved my fallibility, and my weakness, early on.”

“What do you mean by that, exactly? Was his academic performance above yours?”

“Not usually. He was on par, at best, but—well, Grady must have told you some of the stories?”

“Let’s forget who my husband is for the moment.”

L swallowed, laced and unlaced his fingers. “Sure. Well, it’s—you know B, you know how he is. He was always like that, even as a small child. It stopped being about academics very quickly, after he arrived, and started being about games. Not about winning games, though, just about playing them. I don’t even think he wanted to win. I thought he did at the time, and so I would put my all into everything—chess, hide and seek, crosswords, races, trivia, the normal games, and the weird ones, too, like holding our breath for as long as possible, or memorizing DNA sequences, or, there was one where—and this is gross, I agree—he would lick the palm of my hand and we’d time how long I could go before pulling it away in disgust. I drew the line at flipping it around and licking his hand, though he’d try to get me to. When I look back on it now, I think he liked it best when I’d win. He always made me work for it, though. It was almost like he was trying to prove to me what I was capable of, how much I could withstand, how badly I could beat him. We would physically fight, when we got a little older, ten and twelve, around that age. He would start them, and I would try not to engage, but once he got me going it was hard to stop. I think he liked it when I battered him up. He liked my attention. God, that’s bad, isn’t it? I didn’t intend to fuck him up, but I clearly did. ”

“You believe he would have grown up better off if you hadn’t played into it? Do you think you ought to have just ignored him?”

“Maybe? Or even just showed him a little kindness, but I didn’t, or if I ever did, it was by mistake and I was fully ashamed of it. He made a mess of me, so I wanted to make him feel worthless. When we were old enough for hormones to play into it, I did everything I could to convince him that his feelings were one-sided, that I would never and could never find a single attractive quality in him, even after we started screwing around in earnest.”

“Did it stay that way for the whole of your time together at the orphanage? Dark and competitive?”

“You must know it didn’t, if you’re asking.”

“He’s hinted at brighter periods.”

“On the whole, it was unhealthy and unsafe, but there was a time where, after a while, I guess I fell in love with him. The way teenagers do, you know. He was always in love with me, or that’s what he says, anyway. From the first moment he saw me. It sounds like bullshit, but then B defies most earthly logic. I held out as long as I was able, but there was a point, near the end there, where we were so attached that it seemed that nothing would ever separate us. For all that I declared him a nuisance, I needed him, didn’t have any concept of how to live without an equal and opposite reaction, and didn’t have any real intention of ever finding out. He and A were friends by then—or something. I mean, it had been almost a decade, the three of us were practically brothers. There were a few other children by that time, C and D and E—I think we skipped F—and G, maybe? Possibly G was later. Anyway, the whole abecedarian naming convention fell apart after a while, but they really went for it back then. At that time, A and I even had something of a relationship, though it wasn’t necessarily friendly or by any means close. I think he thought I was a bad influence on B, and I just thought he was deluded for seeing me as the villain in that situation. I considered myself wholly a victim of B’s unwanted attentions, despite the fact that I clearly wanted them and could hardly manage to go without them for any extended period.”

“At this time, you would have been what age?”

“Seventeen or eighteen? I remember B’s sixteenth birthday very clearly because I snuck in through his bedroom window—a first for me—and crawled into his bed. He got a real kick out of that. Sometimes we made each other happy. But, then, after A, things just… He hung himself in his bedroom, with a note that said that he was sorry and that they would need to find another ‘Alternative.’ B wanted to keep the note but Roger said it was important to have it for the records. I think he just wanted it for himself. He always loved A the most. I mean, between the three of us he was the only real option for fatherly projection, but still. Things between B and I fell apart after that. He was sad, in his own odd and performative way, and he wanted some kind of emotional support that I was either utterly incapable or unwilling to give him, and after a few of the worst physical fights of my life—and I’ve been in some really brutal situations in my line of work, make no mistake—he left. Just packed up his things and disappeared. I supposed he wanted me to track him down and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, figured he’d come crawling back pretty soon. I figured he couldn’t live without me. Well, he did. He just replaced me with, you know, killing people.”

“But once you caught him in that, after the LA murders, you didn’t go to visit him, did you?”

“No. No. I felt like I was finally clean, had learned to go without, and I thought that if I saw him again I wouldn’t be able to hold back from… doing whatever it is that I’m doing now, I suppose. I didn’t imagine it would go so well. I didn’t want to need him. I didn’t want to need anybody. I thought I was a machine. There’s actually a funny story along those lines that involves a widespread chatroom conspiracy theory that the detective L is actually an AI. It cropped up in about ’97 and I ignored it for a while until it got so bad that it was affecting my interactions with the police, and I had to go on a massive online deletion spree to get a handle on it. It still flares up every once in a while, though. Well, B admitted to me a couple of months ago that he’d started the robot theory as a fuck-you back when we’d first broken up and to this day he still fans the flames. He says he’s just trying to keep me on my toes. I think it’s plain tacky of him but what am I going to do, monitor his internet use? I do check his history every once in a while, actually, but it’s mostly just porn and anime message boards.”

L shrugged.

Dr. Adeyemi gave a slight, well-managed smile. “In a way, it’s as if he was with you the whole time, then, isn’t it?”

L rolled his eyes. “You’re on his side. Yes, I’ve seen this coming for a long time. It’s because he’s a kiss-ass.”

“There are no sides, L,” she said. “There are no games. Not anymore.”

L was pleasantly surprised to find that she was right.

 

—

 

The deputy on the other end of the line urges them to come to headquarters for proper treatment, but L declines, thanks her, and hangs up. He lands the helicopter on the roof of the hotel they’re booked at, gives the nightshift security guards an exorbitant donation, and goes back to the suite.

“Mind the carpeting.”

B’s dripping blood but not bleeding. His wounds are sealed and barely discernible. He strips off his shredded suit and leaves it in a pile in the corner of the blue-tiled bathroom and turns on the shower. The blood and loose skin slough off him in waves, and L watches backwards through the mirror. The adrenaline is fizzing out and his arm is beginning to hurt. He pulls off his shirt and examines B’s on-the-fly medical work. It will need to be washed and rewrapped.

“I’ll fix that in a sec,” B says. “Come in here.”

L blinks at his reflection. “How is it that you can read my mind, but I can’t read yours?”

“Years of thankless practice. Come here.”

L takes off his jeans and his bandages and does as he’s told. The water falls hot on his wound and he sucks in a breath and jerks it out of the spray. B grabs his jaw with one hand and crushes him to the tile wall, minding his arm with casual precision. L thinks he’s going to kiss him but he just breathes against the flesh of his neck, below his ear, body pressing him flat. B can heal from anything, but it still hurts him. L has tried before to gauge exactly how much it hurts—less than it would a normal person, or more, or just the same?—but since B has never experienced pain in any other way, he has no scale upon which to compare it. It just hurts, he says, and afterwards it aches, but not in the flesh. It aches somewhere lower.

He kisses B’s chin and then he kisses his mouth. B knows when he’s going to die, and so L is never afraid if B isn’t afraid. He doesn’t suppose B would tell him if it was going to be his last mission, but he thinks he’d be able to see it in him, anyway. B kisses him back, warm and undemanding, and L’s arm hurts.

“They tortured you,” he says, dragging his fingers down the front of B’s chest.

“Yeah. That get you going?”

“I’m only saying.”

“No shame in the game, sweetness. You like that I played the squealing victim when I could have ripped them both apart. You like that I took four bullets for you.”

“I wish you could have taken five.” L shrugs his left arm.

“I do, too.” B could snap his ribs and his wrists one-handed, but his grip is so soft. He doesn’t need brute force to hold L still.

L says, “I was kidding.”

B says, “I wasn’t,” and drops to his knees.

L chokes a little and lets his head drop back against the wall. B is somebody who takes too much but also gives too much. L has too much of him. He’s never been able to manage holding it all before now, and even still, his hands shake. His legs shake. B nuzzles L’s cock with his face and it feels so good that he almost kicks him. No matter what, L cannot seem to get any good at navigating kindnesses. He just slumps against the wall and breathes too hard and digs his fingers into B’s scalp. B doesn’t suck his cock, just kisses and pets and fawns over it, and L’s whole body gets warm and bright.

“My arm,” L says, grappling for a foothold.

B pulls back to look at it. It’s bleeding again in earnest, so he rolls his eyes and turns off the water, leaving them wet and mangy and breathing at one another. He nods L over to the counter, wraps them both in fluffy white hotel towels, and tracks water through the bedroom getting the first-aid-kit. He brings L a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water, and treats him with careful hands. L swallows two aspirin and tries to ignore his erection, even though B keeps palming his thigh as he rewraps his wound.

“If this gets infected because you couldn’t keep your dick out of you bedside manner,”—

“Then we’ll consider it karmic justice.”

B rips, then ties. He wrings L’s wet hair out in the sink, and then grabs his wrists and binds them together with medical tape.

“Um,” L says.

“Trust me, you’ll like this.”

“Haven’t I suffered enough this evening?”

“Not nearly.”

B winks, then hauls him into the bedroom.

L has always liked it a little bit wrong, but sex with B is stranger now that they’re older. When they were teenagers, L believed that B was trying to soil him, make him just as guilty and dirty and bad, and B played into that perception because it was titillating. L realizes now that, in a way, sex is the most humanizing thing that B can do. He thinks in undulations, ripples and shakes. He makes his way through conversations by following the way that his tongue feels against the roof of his mouth. That’s what he says, anyway, and L takes his word for it. He is misconstructed and he doesn’t align with the earth’s rotation, but he knows his way around a body. He knows L’s body like it’s his own.

He puts his hand over L’s mouth and fucks him slow. L digs his heels into B’s lower back and slurs that he should try a little harder, so B fucks him even slower. L hyperventilates, but in a hot way. The phone rings and L thinks about shoving B off of him and answering it just to assert some control, but his hands are tied and his limbs are heavy and who needs control, anyway? It’s overrated. B lifts one of L’s ankles over his shoulder and pushes in deep, and L takes the lord’s name in vain several times over, in rapid succession, sloppily against the flat of B’s palm. The phone keeps on ringing.

 

—

 

About a month ago, L woke up at dawn from a quick and dream-laden nap to find B watching him with a cautiously tender expression. L sucked on the inside of his mouth and realized that he’d been in the middle of saying something, but wasn’t sure if he’d been speaking out loud or just in his head. His neck ached and he was thirsty. B had a fashion magazine open in his lap and a Carlos Castaneda book open within that, but he wasn’t looking at either.

“You’ve stopped dreaming about him,” he said to L, who blinked back. “Don’t give me that look. I can obviously see into your brain when you sleep.”

“You can’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t say that.”

He didn’t know if the dream he’d woken from was about Light or not, but even if it wasn’t, plenty of them still were. Long, drawn out, circular conversations on a backdrop of ashen carpeting and off-white walls. A stink like old coffee and bleach. The hum of electricity and the way he’d looked in the green light when he hadn’t said goodbye.

B leaned in closer, propping his chin on his knees. “That’s not him, that’s just a representation. An idol. Like how the crucifix is a stand-in for Christ. They mean the same thing but they’re not the same thing.”

L meant to tell him to stop talking nonsense and roll over but he found, as he always found when he really listened to what B was saying, that he was right. He opened his mouth, held it there, and tried to picture things that once happened, feelings he once felt, but they were misshapen and exaggerated.

“I—yes. I suppose. I’m beginning to forget what his voice sounded like. That frightens me, in a way, but it’s also a relief.”

“I remember his voice,” B said. “I hear it in the wind through the treetops, and the whistle of the trains.”

“Stop it. You didn’t even like him.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m just telling you what I hear.”

After Light’s—disappearance; yes, there’s a proper euphemism—B grew a weird reverence for him. He’d been at his throat for the full day or two that they’d been near one another, but he seemed to have gained a retroactive appreciation for him through the pain that his absence caused L. The grief never really belonged to both of them, but B would shoulder it sometimes, relieving L of the burden. He took on the memory ofLight Yagami like it was his duty. There was a while where he would say, “Kira bless,” whenever somebody sneezed, until L made him cut it out. He was worshipfully patient with every remaining ounce of love that L had for Light, and L knew he should thank him for that, but didn’t know how.

He said, “Please, don’t tell me.”

B said, “Ruth says it’s better to tell the truth than to try to make people happy, and she’s right.”

Sometimes L wished that he had never taken B to therapy, so that he wouldn’t whip out these wholesome platitudes all the time. He rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, yes. She is.”

He couldn’t get back to sleep for three days.

 

—

 

B makes L come twice because he is demanding and mannerless. His body thrums with warmth as B cleans the semen off his stomach with one of the complimentary washcloths and nuzzles his jaw. He feels chafed and satisfied, and plans to sleep until tomorrow’s conference with the Minister of Police, if he can manage to, but his phone rings again and he figures that anyone brave enough to bother him this much must have something important to say.

He sways, sticky and disoriented, across the hotel carpet and snaps open his cellphone. The caller ID says _Winchester, England_.

“What is it?”

B is stretching on the bed, spine elongated, sleepy and sleepless.

Over the line, Watari, terse as ever, says, “He’s awake.”

L doesn’t have to ask who.

 

-

 

tbc.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading. any and all comments are appreciated.
> 
> see you next week for lawlight. B-)


	2. him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, this ended up being longer than it has any right to be. i have a lot to say about this but i forget all of it right now. i started writing nights in december 2012, so cheers to four and half years of personal growth and the story that taught me how to write. this might not be the ending everybody (anybody?) wanted, but it's an ending.
> 
> thank you for reading.

Sayu tells it like this:

“He woke up five days ago. Nothing happened with his—vitals, or whatever. He just woke up. Mom got the call the other day and we drove over. I don’t know why, but I thought he’d be exactly the same, like no time had passed for him at all. But he’s… different. It’s not just that he looks different, like he’s thinner, or whatever. I don’t know how to explain it. Dad convinced the doctors not to call you yet. He said Light needs time to recover first, but I heard them all arguing, the policemen who worked on the Kira case, and it didn’t sound like they wanted to tell you at all. Light kept asking for you, though. He and Dad act all smiley when Mom and I are around, but I’ve overheard them yelling at each other twice now, about—Kira, and you, I think. Light asked me to call you. I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea, but he wouldn’t let it go, and he—well, you’ll see. He’s been so sad since he woke up and Mom doesn’t know what to do and I—I told him I would. It took me two days just to get the number for that man, your assistant or whatever, out of Matsuda, and I kept expecting him to crack and rat me out to Dad. But, well, I guess it doesn’t matter if he does now, huh? I just want to ask you something before you go in there, Mr. L.”

They’re standing in the fluorescent hallway of the Ōkubo Private Hospital, outside the last door that L had ever intended to reenter. As soon as he got the call, he and B went to the airport and bought out two seats from other passengers on the first available flight to Tokyo. L’s bullet wound reopened during the flight, upsetting a mouthy Australian three-year-old, and B had to dress it for him in the back beside the complimentary drinks cart, with all the flight attendants watching and whispering and trying to snap photos.

L has not shaved, or washed his hair in a week, and he’s been wearing the same pair of jeans for three days. B, typically, manages to make his travel-worn scruffiness work for him. He’s still wearing the suede loafers and the sex offender cologne.

Sayu Yagami does not look particularly excited to see either of them.

“What’s that?” L asks her, tetchy and impatient.

Sayu takes a deep breath. “Was my brother really Kira?”

L blinks at her. There is a lot whirring inside of him that he has to lock up tight. He says, “He still is, as far as I know.”

Sayu nods. She looks a little winded, but she doesn’t cry or anything. “Okay. Alright. Let’s go in.”

“I’d prefer to see him by myself, if that’s alright.”

“What? Oh, I don’t know. Not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that if something happened and then Dad found out, I’d,”—

B pipes up, suddenly large, using his most trustworthy voice, “It’s okay, we’re not gonna let them cause a scene. I’ve got ears like a hawk. Like a really special hawk. Somebody’s heart rate so much as kicks up in the next room, I’ll know.” He taps his temple and nods Sayu towards of the metal folding chairs.

“Um. I guess.”

“ _Behave_ ,” L says, with gratitude that doesn’t show in his voice. Nothing shows in his voice. Six months ago, he wouldn’t have dared to leave B alone with her, but now B’s lenient eyes on the back of his neck are the only thing that gets him through that door.

His feet move too fast and his arm hurts. The door clicks open and clicks shut behind him. There are no trumpets. No angels descend to sing the glorious return of the king. There’s just a white lumpy shape on a hospital cot in a lowly lit room. The window is open to let in the breeze, but the blinds are drawn. L disturbs things. His presence is stark against the cool hospital tones. He doesn’t know where to start, so he just stands there.

The shape moves. Light drops his knees flat and his head pops up and he taps a pen between his fingers. It gives L a minor fit of panic to see him holding that, of all things, but he faces L bravely and holds up the flip-book he’s got in his other hand, showing him its cartoonish cover.

“Don’t worry. It’s just sudoku puzzles. They won’t even let me near a newspaper.”

L should keep moving forward, but he’s stuck by the door. Light is sallow and his hair is almost to his shoulders. His face has thinned out, cheekbones sharper, eyes sunk deeper within his skull, but he’s still inexpressibly beautiful. One of L’s instincts says to hug him and another says to kick the shit out of him, so he sits on both.

“Ah,” he says.

“No computers, either. No news of any kind, and no photographs of anyone. I’m only allowed to be treated by the same handful of doctors and nurses, and I can’t receive any visitors outside of my immediate family. I tried to have someone come in here to give me a haircut, but that didn’t go over well at all. I’ve told him that I don’t have the Note, and couldn’t kill anybody if I wanted to, and don’t have the Eyes, so I wouldn’t even be able to tell their names, but he doesn’t listen. It’s hard for him, of course.”

“Your father?”

“Yeah. My mom and sister don’t know. The taskforce does, but they’re not allowed to come see me.”

“You sister does now,” L says, and stands there and feels useless. Why is he here, again? To contain the threat? Don’t anybody play stupid.

“Huh,” Light says, and sits sideways on his bed so that his bare feet touch the floor.

L is in beat up white tennis shoes without socks. He feels sweaty and derelict. He tries to remember what they had in common. “I,”—he starts, just as Light begins with, “L.” They both stop and blink at each other. L’s been to the depths of himself and back with Dr. Adeyemi, but he always avoided this pulsing fist-sized patch of pain in the pit of his stomach. He told himself that it was too soon. He figured he’d have the rest of his life to work on it. Light wasn’t supposed to come back. According to every credible and non-credible source, according to Rem, according to all aspects of the biblical canon and most offshoot cultic works—according to everything and everybody but B.

L hates being wrong and he hates this awkward silence.

“L,” Light says again, and then he smiles, too handsome even in his state of disrepair. “You look the same.”

L is not the same, but he doesn’t say that. “I’m still twenty-five.”

“Yeah. They told me that only eight months have passed here.”

L sniffs. “Eight and a half. Why? How long was it for you?”

Something clenches in Light’s face, around his jaw and in the center of his brow. “Longer.”

“How much longer?”

“Well, I realize now that there’s no such thing as time. That’s something I realize. But, experientially, it was—a lot longer than eight months.”

“Light,”—and that name comes out with difficulty; he doesn’t know how, but he feels like he’s said it wrong—“where _were_ you, exactly?”

“Oh,” Light says. “Oh no.” He stands up, looks eager, and shakes his head. “If I give everything away out of the gate, you’ll have no reason to stick around. I’m not going to just solve your mysteries for you.”

L feels stricken, mouth stuck half open. “I’m—Light, I’m not going to stick around.”

“Take me with you, then. Whatever. You have to have me prosecuted, don’t you? Take me to the The Hague in the Netherlands. Put me in front of an international court. Are you telling me that’s not what you came here to do?”

He’s taking slow steps closer to L. L’s brain has to tell his feet not to step back.

“I came because you asked for me. Didn’t you? That’s what your sister said.”

In truth, L had not known that until five minutes ago. He didn’t ask for details or explanations, he just moved as quickly as he could through the airport, through the city streets. He hadn’t even bothered to get a rental, they’d just taken a cab to the hospital. He hasn’t booked a hotel yet, or informed the Papua New Guinea Police that he has left their country. He doesn’t know how to explain the force of magnetism that had brought him so quickly and relentlessly to Light’s hospital room. He assumes there’s a clue or two in Mello’s essay.

“You didn’t name me,” Light says. “To the police, to Interpol, or anybody. You told them that Kira had been killed and refused to reveal their identity, and let everyone believe that I was just a plucky intern who got caught in the crossfire. That’s what my dad told me.”

“Yes, well, I didn’t think that your family should have to suffer anymore than they already had for your crimes. I didn’t—honestly, Light, I didn’t think that you were ever going to come back. I didn’t make any plans for this.”

“Well, I have some. I had Sayu bring me a change of clothes. My dad’s at work and my mom’s at book club, but one of them will be over soon. They don’t go two hours without checking in on me. I need you to get me out of here, L.”

L’s shaking his head before Light’s even finished speaking. Light reaches for him and L finches without meaning to. Light doesn’t try again.

“Please,” he says. “This is me turning myself in. Serve up some justice.”

“No. There’s no way.”

“I can’t stay here. I’ll go insane. My dad doesn’t know what to do with me, and he’s just keeping me locked up until he can figure it out. He’d have probably killed me by now if it weren’t for my mom and Sayu.”

L says, “Maybe that’s what you deserve.”

Light’s fingers visibly twitch and something new and strange shifts beneath the skin of his face. He’s supposed to be nineteen but his eyes look older. He says, in a carefully controlled voice, “Maybe I already got what I deserve.”

L blinks. His pulse still hasn’t settled.

“Now,” Light says, with calm authority, “I’m going to go out into the hall and get that change of clothes, and you’re going to take some deep breaths and acclimate to this situation, because you clearly haven’t yet. I’ve had some time to think things through, though, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way it’s possible for me to live on this earth is with you.”

He doesn’t touch L but comes close as he walks to the door.

“Don’t,” L tries, but then it’s happened, he’s out in the hall. L follows.

B is sitting next to Sayu, showing her one of his earrings. Sterling silver, rainbow moonstones. L remembers the price. He started off buying B things so that he wouldn’t steal them, and then kept on out of habit. They look up when Light steps out. Sayu smiles guiltily. B is placid and casual.

“Hey, little brother. Good to see you up and at ‘em.”

L moves instinctively to stand between them.

Light frowns. He looks at B like he is trying to place him, and says, eventually, “Hi. It’s—a letter, right?”

“B, as in _behave_.” He smiles a smile that is for L, but which he points at Light, as he pops his earring back in its hole. “So, we getting out of here?”

“No,” L says.

“Yes,” Light says. “Sayu, will you hand me that bag?”

“Look,” L says, trying to keep his voice pitched low, “I’m very sorry for your familial issues, but I am not kidnapping you.”

“Why not? I did it to you.”

“Yes, and remember how well that turned out?”

Light shrugs. “We’re all alive, aren’t we?” He glances sideways at B. “Some more than others. Thank you, Sayu. You’re truly the best sister a person could ask for.”

“Are you really leaving?” She’s frowning, but stolid. She reminds L a lot of Soichiro.

“No,” L says.

“Yes,” Light says. “I know this is a lot, and I’m sorry it has to happen so quickly, but you know how Dad is. I wish we could have spent more time together, but I’ll write you letters, if I’m able to. As long as you don’t tell anyone about them.”

“Of course,” she says, following Light’s path toward the door with wide eyes. She loves her brother. L hates her brother with a depth and severity that he had forgotten he was capable of.

His fingers clench at his sides. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Light pauses and sighs long-sufferingly, but doesn’t turn around. L’s ready to kick the shit out of him now, but he feels B’s heavy palm on his shoulder, fingers digging into the flesh.

“Maybe,” B says, “we should all discuss it over lunch.”

L shrugs him off. “We’re not going to discuss it. It’s doesn’t need to be discussed. You can’t just have whatever you want whenever you want it.” He addresses that remark to the back of Light’s head. “That’s a fact of life, and a lesson that you need to learn at some point. Now seems like a good time.”

Light turns with slow aggression. He’s smiling when he speaks and it’s been a long time since L has been afraid of him, but he feels as if he could relearn it.

“You don’t want to know,” he says, and walks straight up to L, back stiff, shoulders set, eyes devoid of sentiment, “the kinds of lessons that I’ve learned.”

He seems braver, somehow. L’s prepared to hit him and find out, but then there’s a clang as the door at the far end of the hallway shuts behind somebody and he doesn’t have to turn to know that they have bigger problems. He expects Soichiro or Sachiko, a panicked doctor, or any number of relatives and friends with flowers and balloons for one of the other patients in the ward.

He does not expect Misa Amane, but that is what he gets.

Small and fast-moving, in a black _Juicy Couture_ sweatsuit, hair in a bun, with a duffle bag over her shoulder, she looks as if she’s fresh from a long journey. Her sandals clatter on the linoleum until she sees them all, and stops. Her eyes flit from Light to L and back again, quick and calculating, and L doesn’t know why he is relieved to see her, but he is. Something about her makes him feel less alone.

“Who—did you?” Light looks to him and L shakes his head. “Sayu?”

“What? No. I did exactly what you said. She must have—found out some other way.” She takes a few steps forward, because no one else will. “Misa, oh my god, it’s good to see you.”

Misa doesn’t look at Sayu, doesn’t say anything, just lets her bag slide from her shoulder onto the floor beside her and starts to cry. Softly at first, and then harder. She’s not wearing any make-up, and nothing smudges. Sayu stops short, and looks back at them, like she’s not sure what to do and wants permission. Misa’s tiny sobs echo through the hall.

L looks at Light and Light looks at L and neither of them have a good explanation, or plan of action.

After a moment, B rolls his eyes, mumbles, “And they call _me_ maladjusted?” and walks over to Misa to take her in his arms. She resists at first, holding him off, but eventually she just slumps against his chest and cries in earnest, processing a cataclysm of emotions which L thinks he can probably relate to. B coos and pets her hair. “It’s alright, sweetpea. It’s gonna be alright. It’s never really as bad as it feels. You’re gonna be just fine.”

Over her head, he gives L a deprecating smile that says: _You, too, sweetpea._

L pinches the bridge of his nose and decides that he’s going to have to deal with this situation after all.

 

—

 

L did not spare Misa out of mercy, but for tactical reasons. Rem promised to execute him and the entire taskforce if he prosecuted her as Kira, and after the week, month, and year that he’d had, L though that dying then would defeat the purpose. He left it up to Rem to convince her to confess, but took care of the rest himself. After she documented everything in writing and on film, he got her to surrender her notebook with the promise that if she did so, he would allow her to see Light when he woke up. L never had any intention of keeping this promise, because he didn’t think that Light would ever wake up. He sent her to a psychiatric hospital in Yamanashi, signed off for her release after enough time passed and her doctors reported marked improvement, and tried not to think about her.

The first message came after about a month after she got out.

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_from:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_sent:_ ** _friday, may 6th, 2005 9:48 PM_

 **_subject:_ ** _hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_hi, ryuzaki. it’s misa. i was told that you check this address. i’ve been wanting to contact you for a while but i wasn’t brave enough. i tried to visit light in the hospital last week but they wouldn’t let me. i guess he’s still asleep so it doesn’t really matter, but i was hoping that you could get them to let me in. i want to see his face, even if he doesn’t move or do anything. maybe you’re wondering how i am? well, i’m doing okay. i’m better than i was. i have a little house with a garden. i thought that maybe you could answer some questions for me. for a long time i didn’t want to remember, or think about it, but now thinking is all i really have and it keeps me up at night. most of it’s gone. whatever it was. but i see the black monster and the white monster and the orange monster, and your face real up close. light’s face, too, but i don’t mind that. they took away my journal when i left the hospital, so i started a new one. i write down all my dreams and everything that i remember, but it’s hard to keep track of what’s real and what isn’t._

_please write me back, okay? don’t laugh but i kind of miss you._

_xoxo misa-misa_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_from:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_sent:_ ** _saturday, may 7th, 2005 6:03 AM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_Misa, where did you get this address?_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_from:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_sent:_ ** _saturday, may 7th, 2005 4:51 PM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_wow, good to hear from you._ ( ￢ _ ￢ ;)

_if you really need to know, matsu gave me your email, but please don’t be mad at him! i begged and begged him and i think he felt bad for me. everybody always feels so bad for me. even people who don’t know me at all. they think i’m just some idol who got addicted to drugs and had a mental breakdown. it’s really insulting, what some of the magazines print about me. i try to talk about light to people sometimes, but everyone thinks i’m crazy and making things up. they say he isn’t real. they say he sounds too perfect. well, that was always his problem, wasn’t it? i figure you’re the only person in the world who understands me, because you loved him, too. i don’t know how i know that. i don’t think he ever told me and i don’t think you did, either, but i know it._

_write back more this time, okay?_

_xoxo misa-misa_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_from:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_sent:_ ** _sunday, may 15th, 2005 2:29 PM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_ryuzaki, can you please answer?_

_xoxo misa-misa_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_from:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_sent:_ ** _monday, may 16th, 2005 12:02 PM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_ryuzaki. please. l. l l l l l l lawliet._

_please._

_xoxo misa-misa_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_from:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_sent:_ ** _monday, may 16th, 2005 1:47 PM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_Misa, if you ever write that name online, or anywhere else, again, I will have you sent back to that hospital indefinitely, do you understand?_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_from:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_sent:_ ** _tuesday, may 17th, 2005 7:14 AM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_well, it got you to write back, didn’t it?_

_listen, i keep having this dream that the three of us all live together. i can’t remember that well but i think that happened. that happened, didn’t it? the background always changes. we’re in different rooms and beds and houses but i swear we were like a family, at one time._

_i know i killed people. they tried not to make it obvious at the ward, but i could tell by the way they looked at me, and by how matsu talks to me. i know i was kira. i know i was a god, okay? i keep thinking that if i was a god then how come i’m still so scared? i keep thinking when is this going to make sense? i never saw a drop of blood but i know i killed a lot of people. i know i killed you but you came back and back and back. i’m sorry i did those things but i was just trying to be good. you understand that i was just trying to be good, right?_

_please write back._

_xoxo misa-misa_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_from:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_sent:_ ** _friday, may 20th, 2005 4:59 AM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: re: re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_Yes, I understand. I’m sorry._

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_from:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_sent:_ ** _friday, may 20th, 2005 11:13 AM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: re: re: re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_hey, ryuzaki, you don’t have to be sorry. i know it was his fault, okay? i’m not stupid. i know you think i am, but i’m not._

_my garden’s getting really good. i grow perfect cabbages and yams and in the autumn i’ll do pumpkins. there’s a market we do in town and if i can grow enough, i’ll get to have a table and sell there. it isn’t very much but it’s the most i’ve done in a long time and i’m proud of it._

_have you called and told them to let me in to see light? i know you can do it. you can do anything. you’re kind of like a god that way, too._

_xoxo misa-misa_

 

 

 **_to:_ ** _rryuzaki.contact@whoo.ac.uk_

 **_from:_ ** _lolitagirlmisa_x@ezweb.ne.jp_

 **_sent:_ ** _sunday, may 29th, 2005 3:44 PM_

 **_subject:_ ** _re: re: re: re: re: re: hey!!_ _(´_ ∀ _` *)_

_please write back_.

_xoxo misa-misa_

 

 

L did not write back.

 

—

 

He books a room at Hotel Seiyo Ginza and calls Papua New Guinea’s Minister of Police, pleading an emergency situation which required his immediate attention. He’s a little annoyed with himself for following his assertion that Light cannot simply have whatever he wants by immediately giving it to him, but L’s now got two— _two_ _,_ count them—mass murderers for whom he is responsible knocking around Tokyo, and he has to keep a handle on things.

They order up tea and coffee and baked goods. The room is clean, high-ceilinged and cold with quiet air conditioning. Light doesn’t want to sit next to Misa, L doesn’t want to sit next to Light, and B bobs and weaves between them like a host.

“Matsu’s the one who told me Light was awake. I took the first train. I don’t even think I locked my front door, it was that spur-of-the-moment. I haven’t felt so happy in a long time, the whole ride over here was a blur, and then—it’s just. Seeing you with him.” She sniffs a little, and dabs at the corners of her eyes, but she’s smiling. “After everything, it just hit really hard. I mean, you couldn’t take five minutes out of your busy detective schedule to send an e-mail, but of course as soon as I don’t want to hear from you, you’re right there. Typical.”

L finds it interesting that she’s addressing her remarks to him, and not to Light, who’s sunk into a chair at the far corner of the room. The tan sweater that Sayu had brought for him hangs off of him a little, a size too large. It looks new, like something his mother bought for him in tender expectation of his awakening.

“Matsuda really doesn’t know how to keep a secret, does he?” L says.

“He’s just nice, is all,” Misa says. “He’s got a heart, unlike the rest of you.”

“Macaron?” B holds one out to her.

“Thanks. Hey, who are you again?”

“Me? Oh, I’m L’s assistant, of course.”

From his corner, Light snorts. L watches him and tries to reign in his frown.

Misa asks, “What happened to Watari?” around a green mouthful of macaron.

“He decided it was time to retire from active field work,” L says.

“You shot him,” Light says. He’s got his fingers pressed to his temples, concentrating hard, as if trying to remember. L has to remind himself that there’s no telling how long ago all of that happened for Light. “You did, right?”

Misa gasps and giggles, hand over her mouth. “What? Oh my god.”

“It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault.” He grumbles, but doesn’t implicate B because he is his only ally.

“He _always_ says that,” B says, climbing over the back of the sofa to collapse onto the cushions beside Misa. “Anyway, old Q thought that it was about time he went back to pushing pencils, since I’m so much younger and spryer and better equipped for the job.” He doesn’t do any of the things with his eyebrows that he could, and L knows he should be relieved but his petty parts, which make up the largest portion of him, want Light to feel displaced. He wants him to see that there is no place for him in L’s life.

“You do Watari’s job?” Light asks B. “Watch the cameras, parley with the police, man the rifle—that kind of thing?”

“That’s right.”

“Aren’t you a serial killer?”

L rolls his eyes.

B sucks on his teeth, and grins. “Aren’t you?”

“Aren’t we all?” Misa raises her little teacup, and looks around. “Cheers!”

Her cup waits in the air by itself until B swoops in and clinks his own against it. L, begrudgingly, gives his mug of coffee a little lift, even though he’s not in the club. He’d forgotten Misa’s incongruent humor just like he’d forgotten that her eyes are brown behind the contacts. He can see her nerves. Light’s return is her most treasured fantasy, and yet she can’t manage to look at him for longer than two seconds for fear of spoiling it.

Light doesn’t join the toast, but stands discreetly and takes soft steps around the edges of the room to the balcony door. “I need some air,” he says, and goes out.

B cocks an eyebrow and L looks into his cup.

“He seems different, doesn’t he?” Misa says. She swings her feet and practices her smile.

“Perhaps,” L says. Most of Light’s personality before was a performance, integrated through repetition and single-minded focus, and developed enough for him to pull back one false layer just to reveal another. The thing that lived at the center of his perfect skeleton was frightened and rabid and impatient and weak, and L missed that thing so much until he made himself stop. The person here now might be different and might not be. There’s no way to tell when he’s acting until he stops, so one must assume that he always is. It doesn’t matter, either way. L made himself stop.

The three of them sit awkwardly in Light’s absence until Misa gives a tiny, staged cough and turns to B. “So, who did you kill?”

B titters and shoots L a look. “Oh, lots of people.”

L rolls his eyes, grants him permission.

“But, like, how?”

“Would you say that you’re relatively familiar with the bodily process of internal hemorrhaging?” His voice is so slick and pleasant when he says that.

L goes out on the balcony and shuts the door tight behind him.

 

—

 

It’s hot in Tokyo today. It’s a Tuesday, and the city moves as it ever has. Kira is still a topic discussed on broadcast programs and morning round-table news specials, but it is nothing of the sensation that it once was. No one is afraid anymore. After Kira’s death was officially announced by the UN Security Council—against L’s advice on the matter—there was a spike in crime in almost every country in the world, and a swath of minor to major protests in places like New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Kira was a martyr and L and the world leaders were quashing an attempted coup against their power. A million conspiracy theories cropped up over night, everywhere from _L and Kira are the same person_ to _aliens did it_ to _Kira lives!_

Kira lives.

He’s standing with his hands on the balcony railing and staring at, or past, the city.

L shifts his weight from his toes to his heels and back again. He says, “You can’t just ignore her until she disappears.”

Misa is the easiest subject to navigate. She’d thrown her arms around Light on the way over and he’d just sat stiff and staring, hands at his sides, until she’d slid off and looked at her feet. She’d cried quietly, staring out the window from her seat in the cab, citing pure and overwhelming joy as the reason and meeting nobody’s eyes. L had felt shame on her behalf, and almost put his hand on her shoulder, but froze at the last second. He’d wanted to tell her how to be stronger but then realized he didn’t know.

Light glances at him over his shoulder. “Why not? I never asked for her. She’s the one who tracked me down and gave herself to me.”

“Right, but then you took her and you used her, and now she’s yours, and she’s your responsibility.”

Light sighs and looks put-upon. “What am I supposed to do with her?”

“Just give her some of your time and attention. Drum up a modicum of compassion.”

“Is that what you did?” Light holds his eyebrows high and darts his eyes toward the sliding-glass door, where the vague shape of B looms behind the blinds.

L says, “Maybe.”

Light shakes his head, expression tight and wry. “Come all ye psychopaths? You’ve really got a problem, L. I guess you know that.”

“Maybe I did. Maybe I’m better now.”

“Oh. I see. So, are you in, like, a domestic partnership? Do you watch television and walk the dog and do each other’s laundry?” Light’s tone is biting but there’s something tired underneath the words. He sounds jaded in a way he never did before.

“If I say yes, are you going to get very angry?”

Light’s nostrils flare, but then he pauses, and sort of steps out of the conversation. He holds his hands out in front of him and unclenches them slowly, watching the way the lines smooth out. From the street below, a siren sounds. “No,” he says, after a moment, “no, this—this is fine. This is all just fine.” He tenses and relaxes his fingers again and then drops them at his sides. He gives L a small, self-deprecating smile.

L wants to touch Light’s pretty face with his ugly hands. He murders the urge, and says, carefully, “Light, what exactly… happened to you?”

Light’s eyes get shiny and his grin gets violent. “Well, I didn’t become a god, if that’s what you’re asking.” He swallows, tugging at the sleeves of his redundant sweater. “I was never a god, but, unfortunately, I didn’t figure that out until I got there.”

L’s lips part. He thinks he’s heard wrong. He’s waiting for the punchline. “I—you mean, the Shinigami… plane?”

“They call it a realm. Sort of. Their English is bad and their Japanese is worse.” He bites the inside of his cheek. “They were very pleased by me. Impressed. No human has ever done what I did and I was quite a spectacle. Like a dog that could juggle. I didn’t have my body, of course. I left that here. I was just the insides and I didn’t fit right in their world but I got passed around a lot, anyway. I got oohs and ahs. Everything hurt all the time, but not—physically. Not in a way that I can explain. Time came all at once and sometimes it went away. Sometimes I saw things and people on Earth, but nobody that I knew. I forgot how big this world feels, when you’re on it.” He looks around at the city, and then at the sky. “It looks a lot smaller from far away.”

L’s chest begins to feel hollow, his throat tight. “How did you get back?”

“I played a game with the King, and I won.” Light gives him cocksure look that is more recognizable. Maybe he does it on purpose. "All I had there was my mind, but that’s all I needed.”

Something shifts and stutters in the place where L’s heart was last seen.

“Please take me with you,” Light says. “Please. You can lock me in a cell for the rest of my life, I don’t care. You can even execute me, if you really want to. I don’t think it’d be so bad, if it was you. I just need to get away from here. My parents, my home, even Kira—none of it’s mine anymore. I don’t recognize it.”

L pauses, teeth clamped on his fingernail. “You—you’re saying you don’t believe in Kira anymore? You don’t want to reign over your glorious kingdom?”

“I’ve seen the enough of the kingdom,” Light says, without making an expression, “for one lifetime.”

L shakes his head. If Light’s consciousness truly was suspended in another reality for an indeterminate eternity, then he’s had just as much time to hone his acting skills as he’s had to change his mind. He’s offering L what he knows he wants: a circumstance in which peace is achieveable. He’s saying that the war is over.

L doesn’t believe him. He says, “I don’t believe you.”

Light seems to have foreseen this twist. “You don’t have to believe me. You don’t have to trust me, or forgive me. Just please, let me come with you.”

L closes his eyes and presses his thumbs to his eyelids. All the tendencies that he thought he’d unlearned are right there where he left them. It’s not a question of whether or not he believes Light, but only if the inevitability of being destroyed by him is more or less bearable than the thought of leaving him behind.

He really shouldn’t, but he says: “Clerical work.”

“What?”

“I could have you do clerical work. We’re always behind on filing. B doesn’t believe in alphabetical organization, and it’s hard to hire good help when your identity is highly classified. Some of our computerized systems are outdated and could stand to be restructured. You’d, of course, be limited in your mobility, privacy, and individual freedom. That is, if you think you’re up for the job.”

Light straightens out his expression. He almost looks like himself when he says, “I’m extremely good at filing.”

 

—

 

L leaves B to watch over Light and Misa, and takes the train to the NPA headquarters. Soichiro Yagami has, apparently, been calling Watari’s line—the only way he knows to get in contact with L—unceasingly for the last hour or so. From the Kasumigaseki station, L tells Watari to tell Soichiro to get to his office if he’s not there already.

“I won’t wait around all day.”

He presents his credentials at the front desk, relays the necessary codes, and slumps down the hall to a room he’s never visited before but has watched on many camera feeds. From the surrounding offices, heads lean out and whispers spill over. L sees Aizawa in the crowd, and gives him a short nod that seems to stun him.

The chief is waiting for him when he arrives, pacing back and forth. Matsuda is with him, palms wide, mouth open, halfway through a sentence which he abandons as soon as L walks in.

“Ryuzaki,” he says. “It’s good to see you?”

He looks sideways at Soichiro, who shakes his head.

“Hello, Matsuda-san. I trust you’re doing well. I need to speak to the chief alone.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Soichiro says.

“Yes, it will.”

Matsuda shrugs his way out of the room. L climbs into one of the two visitor’s chairs and tucks his knees under his chin, then gestures to the seat across the desk. Soichiro makes an aggravated noise and takes it. He doesn’t offer L a beverage.

“Where is my son?”

“Seiyo Ginza. Twelfth floor. Send a police squadron in, if you must. Do you want to tell them who they’re after, or shall I?”

Soichiro’s jaw grinds on its hinge. “You cannot keep him from me.”

“I’m not. He went willingly. In fact, he practically forced me to liberate him.”

That doesn’t seem to cheer him up. “I know that you think that you can do whatever you want and suffer no consequences, just because you’re L, but I will not stand by while you once again ignore the law in favor of doing what suits you. What happened last year was a fiasco. The case was utterly mishandled, and that isn’t going to happen again.”

L doesn’t deny that. “Your son is Kira,” he says.

“Yes.” Whatever real and inescapable pain that brings him, he holds in the lines of his forehead. “And he deserves to stand trial for his crimes.”

“He deserves to _die_. Any unbiased court would push for the death penalty in his case, no matter how humanitarian. But you don’t want to see that happen, which is why you’ve been hiding him in that hospital. And I don’t want to see that happen, which is why I’m offering to take this burden off of your shoulders. I won’t execute him. I will contain him.”

Soichiro’s nostrils twitch. “I bet you will.”

L almost lets an expression slip out. “I take your meaning and I won’t argue with you. You have no reason to believe me when I say that I have absolutely no sexual intentions toward your son, but that’s the truth. This is not a fantasy for me. It’s a responsibility.”

Soichiro’s eyes are shiny. He presses his hands to his skull and he looks like he might weep. “I—oh god. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know why this happened. I don’t know what I did.”

“It’s not your fault,” L says, without inflection.

Soichiro lets out a sob-like breath. “Please. Don’t.”

“I have no intention of comforting you, or plying you with meaningless platitudes. Light’s neuroses may have been affected by your profession and your values, but that alone would never have made him what he was. He was the result of a specific kind of ambition combined with a specific kind of personality disorder that happened to collide with an otherworldly artifact of massive destructive power. There is no way you could have seen that coming, or done anything to stop it. It happened, it’s done.”

“Thousands of people are dead because of him. Thousands of lives erased. He caused so much pain, so much misery and fear.”

“Yes,” L says. He’s not sure what part of _it happened, it’s done_ invites tortured rumination, but he’s been trying to practice common decency so he doesn’t say so.

“I love him. He’s my son. I love him so much.”

“Yes,” L says.

Soichiro drops his elbows to his desk, and puts his head in his hands. He breathes through the moment, and then sits up. L is sorry for him, but he processed this tragedy about a year ago, when he realized for certain that Light was Kira. Everyone else is just catching up.

“I’ll need to say goodbye to him. I—my wife and my daughter need to see him one last time.”

“That’s fine.”

“I need you to promise that you won’t let him hurt anybody. I need you to promise me that.”

“You have my word,” L says, as if that’s worth something.

 

—

 

The Yagami family’s last goodbye is drawn-out, bittersweet, and very awkward. Sachiko can’t stop crying, keeps hugging Light one last time, and then again, and again. She calls him her angel and says she doesn’t want to let him go. He holds her stiffly and with a pained, almost helpless, expression. L knows he loves his mother but supposes he can’t manage to reciprocate the depth of her feelings. Sayu’s eyes leak, and she keeps wiping her nose with her sleeve, but she puts up an admirable brave face, punches Light in the arm a lot, and keeps asking inane questions that skate around the reality of his identity as Kira.

It is always different when you love somebody.

Soichiro stands further away and admonishes his wife her dramatics in a low voice, but he does hug his son goodbye, and Light bears it stoically.

Sachiko doesn’t really seem to know why Misa is there—it appears that, during last year’s events, the only crucial revelation that made it into her general consciousness was that Light was gay—but she hugs her and fawns over her, too, saying that she’s always thought she was a good girl, and never believed any of the rumors in the gossip rags. Sayu and Misa gab and giggle in a way that is meaningless but pure in its camaraderie and affection. Sachiko brings out her digital camera and B offers to take a picture of the family together, one last time. Light and his father stand on opposite sides of the image, and everyone’s smile is hollow and full of fear.

L keeps to the edges, and doesn’t speak until he says, “Alright, it’s time to go.”

The fly to London the next morning.

L tells Misa that he refuses to pay her way, and that if she wants to come she is free to do so independently, to which she just laughs and says, “Sure, I have plenty of my own money.” This irritates L, so he buys her ticket, anyway.

It’s a twelve hour flight, and L can barely stand to be near Light for twelve consecutive minutes, so he has him sit next to B and seats himself next to Misa, keeping every one of them in his visual range at all times. Misa tries to talk to him, so L puts in headphones and listens to surveillance recordings on his iPod for as long as he can manage. Misa falls asleep eventually, head on his shoulder, and he wipes drool off her chin and gets her one of those cellophane-wrapped, tablecloth-thin airplane blankets from a passing flight attendant.

He and B trade off on escorting Light to the bathroom. Squeezed between the aisles, waiting in lines of varying sizes, Light’s breath sometimes tickles the back of his neck, and L is sometimes overcome with sudden and acute bouts of air sickness.

When they land, Misa books herself into a nice hotel, and L takes Light home.

He’s decided to put him up at the literal ‘home’ flat, since it’s less lived-in, and therefore not yet unalterably drowned in case files and computer equipment like the other one. It’s quiet and blue-tinged when they arrive. Unwashed mugs wait in the sink and the place stinks like stale coffee. L sees his life from someone else’s eyes and imagines it looks pretty bleak. He gives Light a fresh pair of sheets and tells him to take the bedroom.

“I don’t use it much, anyway. I usually just sleep on the sofa, if anywhere.”

“What about B?” Light asks.

“He doesn’t.”

Light blinks, expression twitching.

“Sleep, that is. He lives here.”

Light’s expression twitches back.

Once he’s behind the door—which L counsels him not to lock if he doesn’t want it kicked down—L goes through his mail, his e-mails, all his missed calls and voicemails. Everything is case-related except for one forthright but obviously difficult message on his home voicemail from Dr. Adeyemi, informing him that she will no longer be able to treat B.

“His preoccupation with me has developed to the point that it makes our relationship as doctor and patient more damaging than productive. I can refer you to a few very discreet and accomplished colleagues, and go over his chart with you one last time, but that’s it. I am, of course, still amenable to treating you, but given all the progress that the two of you have made, I wouldn’t advise that. I don’t think he’d take it well.” Her voice loses its suave professionalism for a moment, at this part. L replays it over and over again after the fact. “I will remind you that we are still, in a strange and roundabout way, family. I’ll see you both eventually, one way or another. I wish you luck in the interim.”

He takes the elevator down to the front of the building where B’s smoking, and tells him. He doesn’t take it badly.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. She called and told me earlier in the week. I think she was more worried about your reaction than mine. I’m working on it.”

L’s jaw hurts from clenching. “Working on it? No. No working on it, or her, or anybody. Your advances have been rejected. You’re not wanted.”

“No _that_ , asshole. I mean, on me—on not doing that. Following people I like home and looking in their windows and leaving them presents I find. I knew she wasn’t going to like it but I did it anyway. I went inside her house when she wasn’t home. I looked through all her things and touched them. I knew it was a bad idea, but that’s just the best way for me to process emotion.”

L massages his temples. “Jesus, B.”

“I know, okay.”

“You can’t do that to people. You’ll—ruin all your healthy relationships that way.”

L realizes as he’s saying it that he’s the last person who should be using the words _healthy_ and _relationships_ in the same sentence, but B doesn’t call him on it. He just looks and looks until L feels seen, and then he stomps out his cigarette and flicks L under the chin, brutish and familial.

“I think I’m going to crash elsewhere for a few days, maybe a week. Give you two crazy kids a little time to sort out your issues.”

“What?” L feels immediately betrayed. “No, that’s the opposite of what I need you to do. You’re my,”—protective barrier? Defense mechanism? Jealousy inducer?—“Watari.”

“I’ll still be around for cases, don’t worry. There’s just some shit that you can’t say in front of a third person, you know?”

L does know, but he doesn’t want to have to say or hear any of those things. He bites his cuticles and says, “Will you be at the other flat?”

B shrugs. “Maybe. There’s always the baby brothers’ place, and Wedy usually has a spot open in her bed for me, provided I don’t mind being tied to it. I could probably even swing an invite to Misa’s room. I think she likes me.”

He winks, and L scoffs. The world is the same shape it has ever been.

“And you aren’t worried that, in your absence, I might reignite some old passions? Forget all about you and renter a tumultuous and dramatic affair with an even more prolific murderer?”

B puts his palms on both of L’s shoulders, and stares him in the face. He’s not the same as he’s ever been, but bigger. The squalling hell-beast in L’s blue jeans and white shirt has grown up and changed outfits, but he’s still in there, and he’s tickled. B used to go through L’s room when he wasn’t there. He used to look through all his things and touch them. He still does, but now he has permission. B is immortal and inhumanly strong and inarguably unhinged, but he just doesn’t scare L anymore.

The boy up in the bedroom, with the well-intentioned eyes and the soft hands—healed of all their pen callouses—laying god knows what kinds of traps, does. He scares him shitless.

“I’ve been clawing out space for myself inside of you since I was six,” B says. “I think I can do it again, if I have to.”

He smiles, kisses L’s cheek, then falls backwards into the night like he knows it will catch him.

 

—

 

L is busy and alert through the night, ready for trouble in whatever form, but Light just rises at 5 AM, jet-lagged and stepping softly, makes a cup of tea, and begins to clean. He starts in the bedroom, throwing out and recycling all of the junk L’s left scattered around, sorting the laundry into piles, wiping thin sheets of dust from all the furnishings, and opening the windows to air the place out. He scrubs the scum from the bathtub, and polishes the panes of the windows. He cleans the kitchen top to bottom, throws out what’s gone bad in the fridge—read: everything—changes the burnt-out lightbulbs, sweeps the floor, asks L why he doesn’t have a mop, and then puts together a shopping list of necessary home amenities.

“You don’t need to do that,” L tells him. “I have a cleaning service that I call sometimes.”

“I like doing it. I find it calming.”

He goes until noon. He spends a full half an hour on the rubber molding in the kitchen, hands sliding this way, then that way, then this way, then that, lulling and single-minded. When he finally takes a break, L calls out for Indian takeaway, and they eat in blessed silence. There is a lot to ask and to answer, but L is waiting for Light to cave first, and Light is waiting for L.

He starts him out on unsolved cases, handing him a stack of bulging manilla folders and a laptop and telling him to have at it. L figures it’s better not to give him cases that come with criminal’s names attached right out of the gate.

“You haven’t solved any of these?” Light asks, attempting in earnest to line the folders into a neat stack.

“There’s a backlog. I’m a very busy man.”

“Hmm.”

It’s not four hours before Light “accidentally” solves one of the cases with nothing more than L’s preliminary research and a Google search. L’s pulse thuds a little with weird pleasure, but he ignores that, and puts in a couple calls to have the work confirmed. He’d sort of expected this, but it does nothing to take away the sting of familiar eagerness. It’s only an echo of the things he’d felt when he’d first met—discovered?—Light, diminished by time and bitterness, but still there is a thrill that comes with once again having competition.

Here’s something that L had forgotten, and now begins to remember, about Light Yagami: he is capable of being, when not overcome by megalomaniacal ecstasies or distracted by rigorous double-failsafe planning, awfully good company.

He doesn’t talk his way through his thoughts like B does, but keeps quiet, concentrates hard, and works quickly. The more work L lays on him, the more meticulous and expedient his results become. He keeps the kettle hot with cup of tea after cup of tea, and knows exactly how L takes his. His lips strain against a smile when he catches L off guard with another solved case from the backlog. L thinks about Light’s hands around his throat—soft, hard, soft, hard; there was a lot of variation—and swallows everything that tries to make its way up.

Still, he can practically feel it in the air between them, a thin and fluid barrier separating the past and the present. Once: the two of them dug so deep into one another that they became of one mind, if not one creed; and now: two men sitting at opposite ends of the room, staring hard at screens in opposite directions. L thinks that if Light put a hand on him, he would quake and he would fold, but Light does not, and L is grateful.

They relearn old patterns quickly. By the third day, they are ducking around each other unconsciously, accommodating one another on instinct. L has groceries delivered from a Japanese supermarket. Light throws L’s laundry in with his own. Light leans over the back of his chair to point something out on L’s computer—a _mistake_ , he’s pointing out a mistake, why is that so attractive?—and L feels the warmth of his skin distantly, like a memory.

B and Misa drop by that night and bring Light new clothes.

“We went shopping for you!” Misa gloats.

Light says, flat and toneless, “Oh, good,” but then he puts aside his work, sits down at the table beside her, and lets her talk at him for a full fifteen minutes. L thinks he even makes an expression or two. Call it progress.

“So, you two hashed out your issues yet?” B asks, slinking surreptitiously onto the sofa where L is knee deep in a cyber-security nightmare. He’s got Wedy on speaker phone, but all she does is yell or whisper, “Shit,” every few minutes, so he mutes her for the duration of what he hopes will be a short and painless discussion of emotional catastrophe.

“No.”

“Should I bring by some whiskey, or something?”

“It’s starting to sound as if you _want_ me to fuck him.”

“I want you,” B says, enunciating the words more than he needs to, “to be whole.”

He doesn’t explain what that means, but L’s stomach clenches, anyway. He is relieved when B and Misa leave, because then there is only one set of eyes that watches him and wonders when he is going to tell the truth. Light, at least, does him the courtesy of trying not to make it obvious.

When Light goes to bed that evening, early because he’s still locked into JST, L stands outside of his door, imagining that he can hear him breathing through the wood veneer. He remembers him delirious with fever. He remembers him raging through sermons. He remembers how he feels inside and how he looks when he is terrified, when he’s bloodied and yelling. He remembers his laughter on the late nights, and the early mornings.

L sleeps then, though it is difficult, curled in on himself atop the sofa cushions, and wakes at dawn to find Light leaning in the doorway of the bedroom, watching him. When he catches L catching him, he doesn’t balk or look away, but gives him an expression full of unnecessary sympathy, and says, “Good morning.”

L coughs and rolls over, burying his face under a pillow.

 

—

 

He goes through Light’s things because—well, because he can, it’s his right, it’s within his power, and when he finds the list he is overcome with a brilliant, body-warming anger. _Mikkel Nilsen_ , the page reads. _Tu Van. Christopher Durant. Jamila Nasser_ , and on and on. They are all names of the perpetrators of crimes which Light has either solved or helped L to solve in the last week. He finds the piece of paper folded up and tucked under one of the pillows on the bed, covered in Light’s small, exacting handwriting. Nilsen, he recalls, killed and mutilated twelve women. Durant ran a homeless shelter where he killed his most down-trodden overnight guests and used their identities to get government benefits. He buried them in the shelter’s yard. They are, inarguably, the worst of the worst. Kira’s favorites.

He waits patiently on the bed for Light to come out of the shower, and then slams the list so hard against his chest that he stumbles back. It falls away, crumpled and a little wet. Light catches it midair, but L snatches it out of his hand as soon as he does, brandishing it once more with a ferocity powered by a week’s worth of restrained rage. Now that he finally has somewhere to direct it, he directs it.

“What the fuck is this?” he snaps. “A ledger? A plan for the future?”

Light’s expression wilts, then locks. “It’s not what you think. It’s just—cathartic.” He’s warm and wet and clean and so stupidly good-looking. “It just makes me feel good,” he says softly, “when I write down their names.”

L tastes bile in the back of his throat. He wants to slam Light’s face into a wall. “It makes you _feel good_? What, do you jerk-off with one hand and write names with the other? Are you so _very_ ,”—He doesn’t finish that sentence. He presses his fingers to his temples and tries to think.

Light could cow and concede, be a good boy like he’s been doing, but something spasms and his face and L can tell that the tacit restraint between them is wearing away.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “should I be more like you? Just gloss past all the people dying, all of the horrible things being done every moment of every day, all the meaningless, fathomless suffering—like it’s nothing? How can you do that? How can you fucking stand doing this job for five minutes without trying to really, to _actually_ , fix anything?”

“I guess,” L snaps, “I’m a just heinous, pitiless person, incapable of human feeling.”

“Oh, shut-up. You’re not, and you know you’re not, and you just want to hear me say that you’re not because you like that. It _feels good_.”

L sneers. “I don’t mean to be indelicate, Light, but you’re the last person on earth from whom I would seek moral approbation.” He crumbles the piece of paper and chucks it at the wastebasket, where it misses, and putters across the floor.

He thinks this would be a good time to storm out, because otherwise he’s not going to be able to reign himself in, but as soon as he shifts toward the door, Light catches him by the fabric of his shirt, bunching it at the front and hauling him close. L tries to wrench away, but Light keeps his grip.

“I know why you’re so angry with me,” he says, with frantic conviction, “and I know it’s got nothing to do with any of the people I’ve killed. It’s because I left you. It’s because I left you behind.”

The bottom drops out of L. He flinches with his whole body, and knocks Light’s hands away with a virulence he can barely control. “Do not,” he seethes, “touch me.”

Light grapples after him, unyielding. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’ll lie to you as much as I please,” L tells him, grabbing Light’s seeking hand by the wrist and crushing it until the pain breaks visibly in his face. “I don’t owe you the truth. I don’t owe you anything. _You_ owe _me_. I saved you when I didn’t have to and didn’t necessarily even want to. You are in my debt for the rest of your life.”

Light shakes his head, quick and vicious. “I saved you, too. I saved everybody. Or do you not remember the whole business about seas boiling, worlds splitting open, that kind of thing? It’s understandable, given that it was a _whopping_ eight months ago for you.”

L remembers. The Eye and the noxious green dark and coming out of it like a drug haze. Waking to find the world not as he left it. He remembers B’s joy at its strangeness, and Light’s hunger, and how he should have known. He should have known.

L says, “We don’t know what would have happened,” but he feels deflated and nearly sorry.

“Bullshit. We were told that the world was going to end if they didn’t take somebody, so I gave them somebody, and the world didn’t end. It was a pretty straightforward chain of events. I’m sure you can make sense of it.”

“But that isn’t why you went.”

Light’s face shifts, weighed down heavily. L lets got of him. The truth is that for all the metaphorical hell that these past eight months have been for L, they were a literal and longer-lasting hell for Light. He tries to picture him floating in some spectral Shinigami land but the image is cartoonish and vague. He tries to remember that he has already paid his dues, when Light says:

“No. No, it isn’t.”

That is where the rage comes from, and the fear, and the hate, and every reason that he is stuck still and unable to go near somebody that he—yes, here’s the word, we might as well say it—loves. Loved? Is it past or present? Is it suspended in midair, waiting to be let back in? There is no such thing as time, Light said, and B says that a lot, too, and there’s a weird congruence in that, because there’s a weird congruence between them. L fell for not one, but _two_ gods* of death, folks. That’s gotta be a record, or something.

(*Light says he’s not a god anymore. So then, what is he?)

L says, “Get your catharsis some other way,” and goes out of the room.

Light’s opens his mouth as if he is going to make some reply, but doesn’t.

 

—

 

L falls into his work and refuses to come up. This is, and has always been, a safe place. Drug cartels, political corruption, serial stabbings, cyber-attacks, weapons deals, kidnappings, on and on and on, expanding in both directions. There will never be a good time to retire. There will never be a good time to even take a bathroom break.

He speaks to Light about cases and cases only, setting him to messy and nearly insurmountable filing tasks and then watching from the corner of his eye as he surmounts them. He wonders how many plans he has up his sleeve. He’d had him searched before they flew here, patted down, all of his belongings rustled through, looking for any sign of a Death Note, a loose scrap of paper. The one he wrote those names down on came from L’s printer. L steers him clear of blank pages from now on. L refuses to let him wear a watch.

The calls and messages flood in as the news gets out.

Wedy sounds unsurprised. “B told me. Look, if you ever need a break, send him around my way. My apartment needs a good deep-clean, but I never find the time.”

Aiber’s voice is tender in its resignation. “Wedy told me. I’m sorry? Or I’m happy for you? I don’t know. Whichever you pick, I guess. I’m not gonna tell you to put him up for lethal injection, because I know you won’t listen, but for christssake, L, don’t make the same mistake twice.”

 _Kira woke up?_ Mello texts. _Can I interview him?_

Roger calls to lecture him. Grady emails his confused condolences, and apologizes for what he calls: _that mess with Ruth. I don’t blame you, of course. I told her to begin with that B was trouble and that she’d better not, but she’s never listened to me once in our whole relationship so no need to start now_.

Watari—Wammy, now he’s just Quillsh Wammy—calls regularly to check in. L doesn’t pick up, most times.

At about the exact time that B’s absence really starts to wear on him, he returns, in ragged black denim and a shirt much too short for his torso, boots thudding against the floorboards and disturbing the non-companionable silence. Light has taken to working at the desk in the bedroom, because he says that the natural lighting is better. L knows it’s just an avoidance tactic, but he allows it because, hey, he loves those.

B hangs over the back of the sofa and leans his chin on L’s shoulder. “I was thinking,”—

“Whatever it is: no.”

B tongues his ear and L tries to slap him away, but he moves too fast, tipping backward on his heels and then hopping onto the backboard so that his hips are level with L’s head. “We didn’t buy Light any shoes, Misa and I. He’s still just got those awful sneakers. She couldn’t remember his shoe size, so I guess she’s really not as good a stalker as everyone claims. Well, I thought I could take him shopping. Get him some nice brown loafers or whatever crappy shit he likes.”

“He doesn’t need that many shoes,” L says. “He doesn’t need to go out that much.”

“Yeah, that’s healthy.”

“Compared to the alternative—which is death, if you’re not able to catch the nuance—I think his health’s just fine.” L sniffs. He can’t remember the last shower he took. “Besides, I need to accompany him everywhere, in case he’s plotting something.”

“Well,” B says, “if he wasn’t coming up with Machiavellian strategies to achieve your tactical humiliation and defeat before, I’m sure he is now that you’re ten feet up his ass at all times. Come on, L. He’s nineteen. The kid needs some fun.”

“Light doesn’t like fun.”

“Don’t you think that was part of the problem? I’m sure if he’d smoked more weed and played more video games growing up, he’d have killed less people. And anyway, you’ll get to be alone for a few hours. Doesn’t that sound nice? You can take a really loud shit, or masturbate, or just,”—

“Oh, fine. God. Take him and get out of my sight.”

L hunkers down further into his stacks of paper and tangles of wires, but B pulls him back up by the hair and kisses his scalp, wet and breathy. L makes a dramatized gagging noise and tries to dislodge him, but honestly, he likes it, and he really can’t pretend otherwise. He has an ally, always. He has a twin, brother, boyfriend, roommate, dog, monster, Watari, whatever, whatever. He has him.

B pauses when Light appears in the doorway, and L does, too, but a moment too late. He shrinks his smile away quickly, and casts his eyes down on the screen in front of him. “Brush your hair,” he says. “You’re going out.”

“Time for us to bond, pussycat.” B climbs over the back of the sofa, balances along it like a tightrope-walker, and hops off with a little bow.

“Oh,” Light says, flatly, glaring at L, “good.”

 

—

 

Hours pass. Hours and hours pass. L starts to worry that B’s killed Light and is stashing the body, or Light’s killed B and is running away before he wakes back to life, and calls B’s cell multiple times.

He only picks up on the third try, and L can hear the thud of gratuitous, nauseating bass over the line, and talking, laughing, screaming joy. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“Heaven.”

“ _B_.”

“No, that’s really the name of the club. Look, can I call you back? Misa’s getting chatted up by a woman but I don’t think she realizes it.”

“Where’s Light?”

“Not sure. Don’t piss yourself, I’ll find him. Last I saw he was trying not to make eyes at the go-go boys and failing. I’m sure he’s in a corner somewhere doing an Oscar-worthy imitation of you.”

“Find him. Get him home. Be prepared to grovel for my forgiveness.”

“Always, Daddy.”

L scoffs and hangs up. He does not want to admit it, but he gets a perverse pleasure from knowing that Light is, at least when out of his element and thrust into foreign terrain, just as socially incompetent as he is.

 

—

 

L talked to B at a quarter past 10. When they come home, it’s rounding 3 AM. B’s shirt is gone and his boots are tied together at the laces and strung over his shoulders. He’s steering Light with an arm slung around his back, steps sloppy, laughing. Light’s laughing, too, but it’s with a stupid, sad joy that jags into confusion, helplessness, a bingeing, gut-rolling laugh, and when B gets him fully into the flat, he throws up in the kitchen sink, crawls onto the sofa where all of L’s files are still spread out, and goes to sleep.

B wipes smiling tears from his eyes. “Oh,” he coos, “he’s actually a bit of fun.”

L scrubs his fingers into his scalp. “I should never listen to you.”

“Well, here I am, fully prepared to grovel.” He holds out his arms, drops to his knees. His skin is shiny and practically glow-in-the-dark. His bones press awkwardly against his flesh from the inside, as if he has the skeleton of something else. “You can come on my face, if you want.”

“That is not what I want. I want him—out of my way. I want him cleaned up and put to bed.”

“He put himself to bed. He’s fine.”

“He’s going to vomit on classified files from Bangladesh.”

B looks at his wrist, where there is no watch. “Oh, would you look at that, it’s my bed time. Guess you’ll have to see to him.” He pops his eyebrows and stands up.

“You don’t sleep.”

“It’s always worth a shot.” B ducks toward the bedroom.

L would like to wring his neck, and could wring his neck, and that would be just fine, but, look, they’ve made progress. They try not to abuse each other anymore, except in simulated sexual instances. “You’re not even staying here right now,” he says.

“I’m moving back in. I thought that leaving you alone with him would get you to deal with things, but obviously I’m giving you too much credit. It’s okay, I’ll help you. I’ll help both of you.”

L follows him into the bedroom, keeping his voice low so as not to stir Light. “Didn’t you tell me just the other day that you were working on trying to _not_ insinuate yourself into people’s lives when you are not wanted?”

“I meant other people. Not you. You’re the exception, always, of course. Forever the exception. You get me all the time. I don’t get a choice, so you don’t get a choice. You’re mine, I’m yours, he’s yours, we’re his, he’s God’s, God’s dead, etcetera, etcetera. There’s something cataclysmic in that boy and if you don’t hold him down, he’s going to float off this earth again. He’s like me. We’re alike. And he’s like you. And you’re like me. You are me.”

L catches him by the arm, holds his still between the immaculately clean bathroom and the immaculately clean bedroom. “You’re talking in circles. Slow down. We’ve gotten past this.”

“Yeah, well, my therapist broke up with me, so now nobody’s holding me to account, are they?”

“I’m holding you to account,” L insists. He looks B in the eyes when he says that because eyes are to B as heels are to Achilles. He’s soft there. He can’t look away.

“And I’m holding you,” B says. He nods toward the living room. “You need to make peace with this, L. I know you well enough to know that.”

L knows he’s right, but doesn’t say so. “It’s—not easy.”

“Buck up. Try harder.” He kisses his index finger, then presses it to L’s lips. “Find a balance. Make it work.”

 

—

 

L goes out into the living room while B sings in the shower. It is almost September, and the night is heavy and cool. He moves his equipment out of the way, brings Light a blanket and a glass of water, and turns the lights off. As he moves to go, Light groans into the cushions, “My feet are hot.”

There are scraps of memory. L can put everything away and not look at it, but stuff slips out. Old sensations buzz down the back of his neck. Tastes lock his jaw. Sounds make his skull tingle. He fell in love with this boy once, this monumental fuck-up, this merciless dictator.

He kneels down, and pulls Light’s socks off with tender hands.

Light sighs, and says, “Missed you,” half-asleep and still able to be brutal.

“I missed you, too,” L replies, very quietly. He hopes that it will get lost in the fog, but Light’s eyes open wider, and he takes the words in, and they seem to satisfy him. He pulls the blanket over his head, and sleeps.

L folds his socks and leaves them on the coffee table.

 

—

 

These kinds of things happen: B gives Light a haircut in the kitchen. L’s arm heals. Misa comes over for lunch and Light cooks her okonomiyaki. An enormous delivery from _Skymall_ arrives at the door. L goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth one morning while Light is showering, and Light doesn’t kick him out, just stares at him through the fogged pane of glass for a while and then washes out his conditioner.

Light asks L things like, “What happened to the chain?”

“What? Oh, you mean The Chain? I—don’t know. I had all of those things taken care of by third parties. I didn’t see to any of it myself. The old taskforce headquarters is being leased out to a company which distributes metal fixtures to home improvement stores, I’m pretty sure. Why, did you want it back?”

“I was just wondering.”

His eyes go to L’s wrists, anyway.

Sometimes L stops pretending that Light is his secretary, and lets him approach case files as if he is actually working on them. L is B’s overseer and B is Light’s overseer and Light is the former God of the New World, so they all rank pretty high.

Light and B have conversations like:

“But if Jindal killed Malhotra, then who killed Jindal?”

“No, no, see Jindal’s _people_ killed Malhotra on Jindal’s orders, but then Jindal’s people killed Jindal.”

“People? What people, specifically?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

“Well, names are important, babydoll.”

“Trust me, I know that.”

“Trust me, _I know that_.”

“Don’t do the mimic thing with me. It was bad enough when you looked like an off-brand version of L.”

“Ooh, maybe I should try a Kira lookalike thing. Khaki button-down, khaki slacks—do they make khaki shoes?”

“Ha. Funny.”

“And a nice moleskin to top it off!”

“I truly wish that shooting you did something.”

“You know, you did kill me once. With the Death Note. Wrote my name down and axed me when I was in prison. Didn’t stick, but it was still a bit of a shock to get a heart attack, since I can’t get sick, or anything, really. My body just heals itself anytime anything starts to deteriorate or get out of order. I’m sure there’s some outer-space sickness or another that could infect me. You ever see any Shinigami sneezing while you were up—uh, down—there?”

“Believe it or not, I forgot to look.”

Light sometimes stares at things on the horizon that L cannot see. Sometimes he wakes thrashing from nightmares. L hears him through the door, and waits until he quiets, but occasionally he doesn’t, and L will go and wake him up and bring him a glass of water and awkwardly ask if he would like to talk about it. Light usually says some variation of, “Another time,” and goes back to sleep. He doesn’t ever invite L to join him, but a more general invitation hangs over their every interaction, in Light’s tried eyes and the twitch of his pen fingers.

L is tempted, but he remembers the bruising and the idiocy. Light is different now, but how much can somebody really change?

That depends on how much time passes. L does not know how much time has passed for Light, and Light is not saying.

 

—

 

After a struggle that would go down in the annals of Wammy’s history if Mello was still a student at the orphanage and not just a legal ward living off-premises, L finally allows him to come over and interview Light.

Matt trudges behind him, jamming buttons on some handheld device that appears to bring him extreme pleasure and extreme distress at unpredictable intervals, and which L knows him to have deferred all of his clothing allowance and most of his food allowance for months in order to purchase.

L arches an eyebrow. Mello shrugs.

“He wanted a look at Kira.”

L blinks. “Fine.”

Matt barely glances up from his game. “Cheers.”

Light comes out in the only one of the shirts that Misa bought for him which he actually likes. L knows this because he wears it often, and L knows that because he watches him constantly and interprets his every word and action with the resolute care and concentration of a code-breaker. They sit down at the kitchen table, which has been cleared of severs, modems, and anything with an antennae attached, and exchange polite introductions.

“I remember you, from headquarters. You’re one of L’s—heirs? Is that correct?”

“Former. I dropped out of the running. I work for Wedy now. She’s sort of teaching me how to be a genius infiltrator and, uh, international spy. But she makes me write a lot of essays because she’s very busy most of the time and doesn’t always have a chance to see to me. She’s teaching him, too. How to be a hacker.”

Light turns to Matt, who’s slumped in an armchair and not looking their way. “A hacker? Charming. I’m Light Yagami.” He gives Matt a pleasant little wave.

“Matt,” Matt says, pausing his game to glance up. “It’s an alias.”

Light laughs, fluid and unperturbed. “I appreciate your caution.”

He’s impeccably himself. L hasn’t seen him like this since he’s been back. He must have practiced that expression of impassive civility in the mirror, because it hardly even looks false. This is how Light was when L met him: vague and indefatigably pleasant and a little bit superior in a way he couldn’t quite name. Kira, at the height of his power and panicking from one grand plan to another, was different, less refined, more exacerbated, relentless, talking fast and asking for a lot and getting it. The Light that has been haunting L’s flat for the last month is neither of those people, but someone brittle, and smart, and possessed of a new awareness. L’s not sure whether he’s learned humility, or just abandoned his sense of self.

L puts his headphones on and pretends to be absorbed in his case, but listens intently, as Mello, somewhat awkwardly, begins the interview.

“I guess, start from the beginning. Wherever you think that is.”

“That would be the day that I found the Death Note. Everything before that is irrelevant. I never had any intentions toward large-scale population cleansing. I wanted to work in law enforcement, but I didn’t truly believe there was any way that one person could make a meaningful difference.” He smiles benignly. “I was wrong.”

That makes Mello frown, but he doesn’t argue, just writes. “The Death Note—where did you find it, exactly?”

“It was at my school. It was just lying on the ground, discarded. It didn’t look very out of place. People drop notebooks and pencil cases all the time. I sort of—I might just be embellishing this in my head, it might not have happened this way—but I thought that I’d seen something falling out of the sky into the courtyard when I was in class. Out the window. I think I thought it was a bird, or just a speck of dust on my eye, whatever. The human brain does all sorts of things to justify the unexplainable. When I first picked it up and read the rules, I immediately thought it was bullshit. Have you ever seen the Death Note?”

Mello shakes his head. “Not up close.”

“The first one I had, the one that Ryuk dropped that day, looked ridiculous. It said _Death Note_ on the front cover in this edgy font and the insides had all these gothic looking designs and I thought it was just some trend or another that I was too respectable to have heard about. I almost left it in the grass where I found it, but I took it home with me. There’s this weird compulsion that comes with the Note. I’m not saying that my actions as Kira were unavoidable, or that it changed my principles in any way, but the Note gives off this low hum. It’s bristling with energy. There’s no way to really detect or describe it, it’s just there. It feels nice to hold it. It feels nice to write in in.” Light’s expression is self-deprecating here. “Or maybe that’s just me.”

“So, what was the first name that you wrote in it?”

L un-mutes the call he’s supposed to be in on at this point. He already knows this part. This is not what he’s listening for.

 

—

 

A half hour later, he hears something that catches his attention through the drone of voices at Interpol, and hits the mute button again, just in time to hear, “When I _first_ met him? Oh, well, let’s see. I thought he was gross.”

That makes Matt snort loudly and Mello’s expression clenches with restrained amusement. L pretends he can’t hear a thing, eyes downcast, fingers tapping over the keyboard.

“Gross, and creepy, and ridiculous. I definitely didn’t believe he was L, even when he told me he was. It struck me as a dumb move, strategically, to introduce himself, but also, it just seemed impossible that someone so high-ranking and unbeatable, someone who had made _me_ afraid, was just a disheveled jackass who didn’t wash his hair. It struck me eventually, of course, that his plan was brilliant. I was unable to kill him without implicating myself, and he was able to get up close and harass me at his leisure, prodding me into slipping up. I didn’t slip up, though. Not at that point, anyway. It was only after we’d spent a lot of time together, I mean _a lot_ of time—he chained himself to me, did he tell you that? Six feet of industrial strength handcuffs holding us together at all times for _months_ —it was only then that I began to actually like him. I mean, I’d respected him since he made a fool of me on live television and pinpointed me in the Kanto region, but I still hated his guts. L’s truly brilliant strategy was actually obnoxiously simple.”

“Having sex with you?”

“Um. I was going to say ‘becoming my friend,’ but I guess he didn’t give you the edited version, did he?”

“I’m not an infant. I’ve been studying case files since I could read, practically, and lots of them involve sex. Anyway, you killed thousands and thousands of people. Do you really think this is the most inappropriate part of this story?”

“I never said that. I just wasn’t sure that L—well, I don’t know why. He’s never had any decorum or shame, so I can’t imagine what made me think he might have developed some recently. Well, do you want to hear about it?”

“The sex? Sure.”

At this point, Matt pauses and sets aside his game. L keeps his face as blank as possible, and doesn’t ruminate over the ramifications of the picture this will paint of him to his—what? Mello and Matt are nothing of his anymore. They’re just kids he knows. And truth is truth. L wonders how true Light will tell it, and tries to hold his pulse in check.

“Honestly, some of it’s a blur. I didn’t have my memories at the time, and I was experiencing the events as—not quite a separate consciousness, but an altered one. When you give up the Note and, with it, your memories, it creates a sort of blockage in you. Those things aren’t gone, they’re just obscured, and as your mind struggles to compensate, things get mixed up. You evaluate causes and effects inaccurately, and it’s hard to keep track of your own motivations. The first time it happened, that he—I’ll say ‘seduced’ me, because I don’t know a better word for it, although it wasn’t like that at all; it was calculated, but clumsy. It was a trap. The first time it happened, it took me a while to decide what I thought he was doing and why he was doing it. I knew it was trouble, but I was into it, because—well.” L thinks he must be making some essential expression here, but doesn’t turn to look. “I’d had plenty of girls confess to me, I’d been on dates, I’d been in semi-sexual situations with them and it just didn’t do anything for me. I’d never thought about men as an option, mostly because of social perception, but also because I considered myself above frivolous things like sex and romance. They struck me as degrading. My attraction to L was consistent with that. It was degrading.”

“So, he propositioned you, and not the other way around?”

“Like I said, he seduced me.”

“I thought you said he was gross?”

“He was. Look, these kinds of things are complex.”

“I know that. Why do you think I’m asking? Wedy says that I have to write a paper which explores not just the motivations of the perpetrator, or perpetrators, but where those motivations stem from, and how they fit into a larger narrative about society, or a specific aspect of society.”

“Well, there’s an obvious angle with the Kira case that doesn’t involve any sex.”

“Sure, but who likes the obvious angle?”

“You know, it’s a shame you dropped out of the running. You might have made a pretty good L.”

“Don’t flatter me, Yagami. I’ve heard all about your schtick.” There’s a smile in Mello’s voice when he says that, though.

L wishes that Light was less effective at making people like him.

“It is an essential aspect of L’s genius,” Light continues on, sounding satisfied with himself, “that he was able to convince me to see him in another light. Something that I came to realize over the course of our ‘relationship’—once again, this is a term I’m only using only because I can think of no better word—was that L is fully capable of presenting himself in almost any terms. If he wants to appear disgusting and irksome, he will. If he wants to be perceived as confident and attractive, he’s equally as able. If he doesn’t want to appear at all, he won’t. If he wants to terrify, to persuade, to excite, to annihilate? He can. He can inspire pity, then, in the next moment, jealousy. He can make himself enigmatic and compelling, or as dull and dry as anybody. I’m not saying that he doesn’t have a set personality, with its own habits and nuances, but he’s able to shelve that person and become another, if the situation calls for it. I guess I saw some of myself in him, or the other way around, except I didn’t feel as if I had a defined and recognizable personality at all at the time. I had always been an amalgamation of the expectations and glorifications of others, and the Death Note was the first thing to really give me any sense of identity. When I lost my memories of it, I lost all understanding of myself, and my place in the world. My relationship with L was, at that time, an act of self-definition. After my memories returned, and my ambitions with them, it became an act of self-violence.”

“You seem like you’ve given this a lot of thought. Been rehearsing for me, or something?”

“Not for you. I had a lot of time to think, when I was in the Shinigami realm. A lot of time. I practiced over and over again what—well, what I would say to him, if I ever got the chance. Now that I’ve gotten it, though, it’s not as easy as I thought it would be. But, hey, he’s probably listening in on us right now, so that’s something.”

L feels Light’s eyes on the back of his neck. He un-mutes the call with unhurried precision, without a shift or a pause or any indication that Light is at all right about him, or has ever been right about anything.

 

—

 

When Light starts talking to Mello about the Shinigami realm—what it looked like: dirty and dark expansive, neither flat nor round but concave in some parts and octagonal in others, shifting, cracking apart, dipping down and rising up and full of skeletons; what it felt like: heavy and encasing, muted, gauzy, like when you try to talk through a roar of sound, that’s how it feels to exist there, you’re always overwhelmed by something larger and more powerful which is drowning you out—L goes out of the flat.

He takes his laptop and a stack of papers and goes to the other one on Wood Street, which he has barely touched in weeks, but where he finds trace evidence of B in the form of discarded silky underpants and various unlabeled jars of preserved fruits. B likes to make jams, likes to pickle things, likes to skin animals and remove their bones, to sort the edible parts from the inedible.

He isn’t there. L thinks about calling him, but doesn’t. He puts the conference with Interpol on speaker phone, curls up on the sofa, and closes his eyes. He tries to imagine himself in that gauzy nowhere-place, but he cannot. He tries to imagine Light here, with him, but he cannot.

 

—

 

He falls asleep in the midst of a heated discussion about international arms smuggling, and wakes near the end of it. It’s early evening and the sun blazes behind the line of buildings on the horizon. L takes the tube back to Covent Garden and fumbles with his keys in the lock. He opens the door quietly, in case the interview is still going on and there’s something worth eavesdropping on, but the rooms are silent but for the hum of the refrigerator. Some of the _Skymall_ packages have been opened, including one that says: _Brightfeet Lighted Slippers - It’s like having night-lights on your feet_.

He pauses when he hears the murmur, panics when he hears the rush of breath. His mind invents so many catastrophes that it is a relief to find, when he peers around the corner, that all that’s happening is that B is palming Light’s cock through his slacks with one hand and petting his hair with the other, as Light, eyes glazed and head tipped back, tries to keep his panting controlled.

L’s brain tells his feet to walk out the door, but L’s feet tell his brain that they’re stuck, they’re going nowhere. He knows this situation is probably his fault, but it mortifies him anyway.

“The throat,” Light says to B, and B detaches his fingers from Light’s hair and brings them down to hover over his neck, palm soft, threat implicit. “It was always the throat.”

“That’s good.” B nods. “That’s a good one. I always liked his spine best, though. There’s something real attractive about spines. On their own, they’re amphibious and strange, like lonely creatures that live at the bottoms of lakes.”

“God,” Light groans, “you’re fucking weird.”

B tightens his grip on Light’s throat. “Seems like you like me, Kira. Or, anyway, you like facets of me. Faces I can make, tones that I can hit.” B slumps forward into a posture that L is disturbed and a little ashamed to realize is his own. “How’s this one?”

“Don’t,” Light says, but he doesn’t sound committed to the sentiment. B curls his palm over his crotch and Light inhales sharply.

“I think you’d like it if I played dead for you. I mean, if I played him dead.”

“No, I’m—shit—I’m not like that anymore. Really.”

“Really? Really. Okay, so what are you like? I’m trying to find out for everybody’s sake. It’ll help us all out to know what you’re like.”

“I don’t know,” Light whimpers. “Shit.”

B sucks on the side his neck and Light folds against him, obviously willing, desperately willing. L wonders if it would have been that easy between them, that if he had only asked he would have received, but then of course it wouldn’t have been easy to ask. Wouldn’t be. He feels ill and a little horny. He wants to watch but doesn’t want to be seen.

“You’re scared,” B says. He makes it sound dirty. “Of what?”

“There’s a lot. There’s—so much.”

“You’re frustrated. Sexually? Emotionally? In every way?”

“Like I said— _ah_ —there’s a lot.”

“You’re angry, right?”

“ _Fuck_. Yes.”

“Viciously?”

“Viciously.”

“Righteously?”

“Don’t play into the God complex,” Light warns. “You might not like me so much if you stir that up.”

B undoes Light’s zipper. “Who says? Maybe he needs a God. He won’t let me be his God, I have to be his twin—but you. You’re perfect for the job. Lead us out of the desert.”

Light’s breathing speeds up. He pushes his hips up and his shoulders down, arching barely, not engaging in the act so much as conceding to it. His desperation is startling and attractive. L feels warm low down and wishes he didn’t, because things are tough enough as it is.

“That’s not,” Light grunts, “what I came back for.”

“I know what you came back for.”

B pulls him sideways by the jaw and kisses him on the mouth, tongue slick and ruthless.

L’s not going to pretend that this isn’t hot. He’s not going to lie and say his pulse doesn’t fume and his dick doesn’t twitch. He’s not going to insist that he isn’t jealous, or deny his desire to occupy the space between them as more than just an amorphous erotic concept, but actually, with his insipid body and its average throat and average spine.

He’s not going to stay.

He turns back toward door, footsteps swift and soft, but as soon as he touches the knob the rustle of clothes against clothes disappears, replaced by a projected sigh.

“You’re going already?” B calls.

This is one of those times that L wishes that the hierarchy of their relationship was more secure, that he could snap his fingers and have B fall in line, instead of snapping and snapping until B grabs him by the wrists and kisses his fingers and tells him that snapping so much is no good for his bones. He wishes he was more able to insist and less able to be convinced. He wishes he had some real power over both of them, instead of this ongoing charade of deference which is able to be discarded as soon as it becomes inconvenient.

“Come over here,” B practically orders him.

“He won’t,” Light says, but he sounds weak to the possibility.

“We all know you want to come over here and get on your knees and suck Light’s cock, and we all know he wants you to. He’s a mess for you, he’s practically,”—

L turns the doorknob. His greatest power has always been and will always be: absence.

 

—

 

He’s waiting for the elevator when Light emerges, flushed and disheveled, into the hallway, so L takes the stairs. Light follows him at a brisk walk, scowling and calling out such convincing entreaties as the occasional, “Look,” or, “L, for fuck’s sake.” He lets him catch up on the ground floor, because the only other option is to head out into the street and dodge him on foot through London, which is a little too spy vs. spy even for L. He ducks into the mailroom because there is a janitor mopping the floor in the hallway. He slumps against a wall of mailboxes, and waits.

Light comes in and shuts the door quietly behind him. “Hey,” he says, lamely.

“Hey.” L glances at his crotch.

The color of Light’s face deepens, but he manages his discomfort better than he used to. “That wasn’t—I didn’t intend for that to happen.”

“Please don’t apologize. You’re within your rights to do as you please, in that respect, if any. It’s not as if I mind, particularly.”

“No?” Light takes a couple more steps into the room. “So, you running away just now, that was because you don’t mind? Particularly?”

“It was a speed-walk.”

“L."

“I was only intending to give you some privacy.” His voice is unnecessarily cutting. He wishes he knew how to be any other way than this.

Light takes another cautious step forward. “And what exactly about me willingly surrendering my freedom to you for the rest of my life made you think that _privacy_ is what I’m after?”

“What are you after?” L says, moving forward too so that Light can’t get him cornered. “I have yet to solve that particular mystery. I don’t even have a clue. I can’t tell if you’ve actually surrendered, or if this is just some long con. I’d like to believe you’ve abandoned your old ambitions, but I don’t know what you’re getting out of this, if it’s not part of a plan that will ultimately lead to my destruction. Skulking around the flat, doing my filing, cooking my meals? What the fuck are you doing, Light?”

Light’s face has been contorting by the second. He looks ready to hit L. “Everything I’ve done since I’ve arrived here is what I thought you wanted me to do. That’s it. That’s the whole dastardly scheme.”

“You think what I want is for you to fuck B?”

“I didn’t fuck B, and that’s,”—

“Semantics. You think I wanted you to tell my sixteen-year-old ward every gory detail of our history together?”

“That’s literally exactly what you told me to do!”

“I thought you’d lie! You always lie!”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Do you think,” L bites out, talking too fast, words too clean and vicious, “I wanted to glean my first crumb of information about your experience in the Shinigami realm by listening in on your conversation with him? Do you think I wanted to stumble upon that in his notes one day, having barely heard a thing about it from you?”

“You haven’t _asked me about it_ ,” Light snaps at him, coming so close that his breath is hot and accusatory on L’s face. “You haven’t asked me anything. Not what I went through when I was up there, not what I plan to do with myself now that the one thing I’ve ever believed in is gone, not even what I’m feeling—which by the way, is: like shit, all the time. I’m barely fucking holding it together. I have to take it minute-by-fucking-minute. I don’t have anything, L. I don’t have anything but you, and you won’t even,”—he stops. He breathes in, breathes out.

L holds it in. That bristling, feathered thing that’s been banging against the inside of his ribcage since Light woke up—an amalgamation of wishes granted and fears realized that can be described most succinctly as: cautious joy—tries to get out. L grapples with it. L holds it in.

“It’s hard to ask,” he says. “It’s easier not to know for sure. Our entire relationship was one long unanswered question. I don’t think I ever learned how to want the truth from you.”

Light shakes his head. “That’s gone. There’s no more arguing over good and evil, wrong and right. I don’t have a side to argue from anymore. I—gave it up. That’s what happened. That’s how I got home. I gave it up.”

“What do you mean?”

Light swallows. This looks like something he doesn’t want to talk about, and that makes it something L wants to hear. “I played a game with the Shinigami King.”

“You said.”

“It wasn’t a game I wanted to play. He offered to play it with me almost the moment I arrivedbut I refused, I said I would never—do something like that. For a long time while I was there, even in pain, even helpless, I truly believed in Kira’s mission. I could see the earth spreading out in all directions, I could see the cycles of violence and hate and greed, all variations of injustice, all types of horrors, disappointments, betrayals, abandonments. All this meaningless suffering. It fueled the fire, for some time. It made me see red. I thought of everything I would do, the people I’d kill, the reforms I’d make, the principles I’d teach. That kept me sane, that idea of a better world, but after a while—I couldn’t tell you how long, we had no clocks or calendars—it started to be too much. I watched evil return even when it was stamped out. I watched people shown kindness and truth revert to violence just because they could. I saw the merciful be double-crossed and vengeful ruin everything around them. My hope started to disappear, and it was replaced by this yawning emptiness, the same kind of emptiness I lived within for the first seventeen years of my life. It’s not that I stopped believing that this world was rotten and needed to be deconstructed and rebuilt—it’s just that I stopped believing that it was possible. It took longer than I can express for me to fully divorce myself from Kira, to really let go, but once I did, I was ready to play.”

L sees the janitor moving around through the warped glass of the mailroom door, hears him whistling some energetic, unfamiliar tune.

“What was the game?”

“It was a death game. All Shinigami games are death games. It’s not with evil intentions, it’s just that it’s in their biology. It’s like how we drink water. The game was this: the King would use his Note, and he would allow me to use his Note, and we would both get to write down only one name. I didn’t have hands or anything, of course, so Ryuk would write the name in my stead, but I would choose it and it would be considered my kill. The aim was to kill as many humans as possible with just one name. For example, if you wrote down the name of a bus driver as he was driving near a cliff-side, he would have a heart-attack, the bus would veer off the cliff, and all the passengers would die. Since there is no way to use to Note to order the person whose name you write down to kill people whose names you don’t write down, it has to be done with a heart-attack, and one heart-attack only.”

L feels nauseous. “And is that what you chose? A bus driver?”

Light looks at L’s hands instead of his eyes. “No. No, I chose an American general, in the midst of a tactical battle, giving orders to his troops. He had a heart-attack halfway through, and things fell into chaos. Plenty of people who died in that battle were meant to die on that day, but 136 were not. That was my total. The King’s was 129, so I won.”

L remembers that general. For eight months, he kept close tabs on every single instance of a lethal heart attack in any remotely public person, but he had discounted that report as not fitting at all with Kira’s MO. Some detective.

“And your prize was… to return?”

His listlessness makes sense now. L realizes that Light’s new attitude of quiet reflection was born not of humility, but of shame. He has fallen, inarguably, from grace.

“Yes, that was one of the options,” Light says. “I got a choice, though. The King offered to give me a Note, to give me a body—there’s plenty of abandoned ones lying around the realm, empty shells, ‘old bones,’ they call them—and to have me essentially become a Shinigami. He said it had been done before. He said I’d earned it. It was that, or be sent back to earth, to my human body that would wither and die, without a Death Note, without anything. Just as I was before.”

He holds out his hands with an ironic flourish, as if to say _and you know the rest_.

A hole opens up in the center of L’s chest. “Why—would you choose this?”

The look Light gives him is overwhelming. “Why do you think?”

“I,” L starts, but doesn’t go anywhere with it. Too much has been lost, ignored, forgotten, or otherwise discarded. When Light first left he felt like he would never recover, but he found a way. He went to therapy, he opened his arms, he taught himself how to apologize, started putting birthdays in his calendar, stopped shaving off his eyebrows so that people could read his expressions. Now here he is—recovered—and here’s Light—the thing he has recovered from—and all he can think is how easy it would be to unravel all that hard-won personal growth, to unmake those sacrifices and unlearn those realities.

“Don’t think for a second that it was an easy decision,” Light says. “I almost took the bait. They all expected me to. But I figured that either Kira’s new world really was impossible, and no matter how many eternities I labored over it, the human race would just never be any good, or—and this was somehow scarier, though it was what I’d always dreamed about—it wasn’t. But, if I succeeded, then what? I would sit on my throne and, without my goal, without my holy mission, I would finally and ultimately have nothing. I would be just like the rest of them, ancient and dreary and _so bored_.”

L takes a steps toward him.

“The only thing I have, or have ever had, besides Kira,”—

Another step.

Two.

—“is you.”

“Light.”

“So, lock me away in your apartment, trail me everywhere I go, chain me to your wrist. Whatever. Doubt my motivations. Assume that everything I say is a lie. Ignore me for days on end.”

“Light.”

“Put me on the cold cases. Hand me over to your cronies. Misinterpret everything I say. Go ahead. I don’t care. I came back for you. When I decide I’m going to do something, I do it. I _came back for you_. I’m here because of you.”

L grabs him by the jaw to stop him talking. The more he talks the bigger the hole in L’s chest grows. Everything comes pouring out fast, and out of order. Light inside and outside of him. Shivering on the rooftop in winter. Beating one another senseless, and washing one another clean. _L Lawliet_ written in his handwriting. The way he looked when he went, when he smiled like Christ himself and climbed the fucking cross. The empty space in every room after that. The space reoccupied, L’s hands reoccupied.

He tightens his grip and pulls him forward and kisses him, stumbling toward the wall so that Light grunts when his shoulder hits a mailbox. He wraps his arms around L’s back and pulls him in. Their noses smash together. L’s hair gets caught between their mouths and makes them sputter, wipe, slick and sticky. Light brushes it out of his eyes, tucks it behind his ears, his smile fragile but growing, his fingers digging in, tight like he refuses to let go. L refuses to be let go. The box labeled Healthy Decisions that lives in his brand new brain has sprung a leak. Good Advice is dripping out of his ears. He presses Light back against the wall and kisses him again, not as sloppy or hard this time around, melding against him. He doesn’t taste the same, he tastes like the brand of toothpaste that L buys in bulk. His lips are chapped and his palms are sweaty and he begins sentences against L’s mouth, entreaties, admonishments, lectures, whatever. L’s grateful for a list of things he doesn’t have names for. He’s sorry for an even longer list. He presses his hips to Light’s, and Light presses back.

The mailroom door opens.

L snaps back and off of him, turning hurriedly and slouching down into himself. There’s no disguising the situation, and no need to beyond the violent reactionary instinct that tells him he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

It’s just the janitor. He seems a little shocked to find them in this state, but doesn’t address it. “Are you Viktor Deneuve?” he asks L.

L blinks. That’s the name that his flat in the building is registered under, so it’s not particularly suspicious, but there’s something in the man’s manner—the speed of his eyes, the twitch of his right hand—that makes him wary.

“Who’s asking?” he says.

That must be as good as a yes, because the man reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a handgun, and shoots.

L barely manages to dodge it, slamming into Light as he does and sending them both careening toward the far end of the room as the bullet ricochets off one of the metal beams and takes out a section of the moulding. “Down,” L shouts at Light, as the janitor shoots again, twice, almost soundless under the suppressor, missing both times, but only barely. L realizes he’s going to die right now, in the mailroom, with no weapons and no idea who is after him for what case, and that Light will die with him, probably, nonsensically, on a Thursday evening in London when he could have just as well become a god, and L’s last thought will be: _why didn’t B ever tell me that we had the same numbers?_

He doesn’t die. More thoughts come. The man stumbles, nostrils flaring, as two fireworks crack and two bullets barely miss him. Light winces with the recoil. He’s holding a Glock 17, not suppressed, so the shots were loud and obvious, sure to draw attention, and L doesn’t think to even say thank-you, just snatches the gun out of Light’s hand, pushes him out of the way of the return fire, and shoots the man in the knee-cap.

“Fuck.”

As he doubles over in pain, L kicks his legs out from under him, kicks his gun across the room when he drops it—where Light, good boy, picks it up—and slams his head into the floor hard enough to knock him out, but hopefully not enough to kill him.

“Holy shit,” Light says.

L waves the gun at him. “Where the hell did you get this?”

“B gave it to me. He said I might need it.” He takes a deep breath. “Holy shit. I guess he was right.”

L’s sure the police will be on their way if they aren’t already. Just thinking about the oncoming bureaucratic fiasco gives him a headache. “Come on,” he says, tucking the gun in the back of his jeans, “we need to get him upstairs.”

Light blinks, swallows, and obeys.

 

—

 

They chain him up in the bathtub that Light scrubs with exacting regularity once a week. B wears the _Brightfeet Lighted Slippers_ as he interrogates him, their weak LED beams shining in his eyes every time he kicks him in the head. L alternates between calls with the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, an unmoved secretary at his building’s property management company to whom he’s attempting to relate his insurance information, and his contact within the High Commission of India to the United Kingdom. Light makes tea, takes concise handwritten notes on all the information B manages to extract from their hostage, and refrains from asking what else the chains, which were handily produced from the bottom drawer of the bedroom dresser, are generally used for.

“If he doesn’t talk soon,” B tells them on his 1 AM lunch break, “I’m gonna bring out the whip.”

Light blinks at L. “The whip.”

L blinks back. “It’s for special occasions.”

The whip helps. Within the hour, the man talks. L reads back over Light’s notes and asks him to bring their hostage a glass of water and inform him that the fee he was promised for L’s assassination will be paid to him in full, along with coverage of the cost of his medical expenses, including, if necessary, physical therapy and mental health treatment.

“So, Malhotra faked his death, framed Jindal, and used that to fuel a coup against him?”

“Yeah,” B says, washing blood off his hands in the kitchen sink, “but Malhotra himself isn’t even who we need to be worried about. The brains behind the operation is his wife, who’s—also Malhotra, I guess. First name Riya. She’s the one who ordered the hit on you. She’s been aware of our investigation for months, and sending us red herrings like a damn professional. Good news: she’s gonna be at the India House for a benefit dinner tomorrow night. Bad news: she already knows what I look like, so there’ll be no hors d’oeuvres or sexy entrapment of pretend-windows for me.”

Then he beams at Light.

“What?” Light says.

“Hmm,” L says.

“He’s perfect,” B says.

“He might be.”

Light glances warily between them. “Perfect for what? What do I have to do?”

L pulls out his personal cell and dials Wedy. “What you do best.”

“Uh… kill people?”

“Okay, maybe second best.”

B drags the vowels across his tongue with vulgar precision: “Schmooze.” He leans very close to Light’s face when he says it. L knows that he’s being taunted, and he likes it.

Wedy picks up on the fourth ring. “I’m not going to ask you if you know what fucking hour of the night it is, I’m just going to bill you per minute.”

L says, “Sure. What size evening dress do you wear?”

 

—

 

They have their informant transported to the hospital in police custody. L tells Light to try and get some sleep, but B tells Light that if he ever wants to graduate from junior detective status he has to transcend the needs of his paltry human body. L says not to listen to anything B says. Light asks how he’s supposed to fall asleep with the two of them acting out scenes from his parents’ marriage all night long, but dozes off in a chair around 4 AM anyway.

Wedy comes over at 9, with Misa in tow.

“I’m so excited!” Misa squeals, carrying a garment bag, a tote full of powders and pastes the origin and intent of which L could not begin to name, and brandishing a vicious looking metal implement that he thinks is a curling iron. “I love makeovers!”

“You are the only person who truly understands me,” B says.

“Watch where you’re pointing that thing.” Wedy takes the curling iron out of Misa hands and sets it on the table. “Is the coffee hot, or do I have to make more?”

“There’s a little, but put on another pot for the team, will you?” L says around the phone pressed to his ear. “Yes, Minister, I heard you loud and clear.”

“Do I look like your secretary?” Wedy gets down a mug. She knows where they keep them.

L rolls his eyes. “B, make another pot of coffee. Yes, Minister, of course.”

B picks up the curling iron and smacks it against the flat of his palm, but obeys without complaint, swanning over to greet Wedy. Misa shakes Light awake in his chair with artless enthusiasm. “Morning, sunshine!”

Light twitches awake, and puts his hands over his face. “What the fuck.”

“I’m here to do your hair.”

He slumps into himself. “Fuck.”

The coffee machine boils and huffs, and L’s pavlovian response to that sound is the anticipation of pleasure. The room hums around him, full of voices and moods. Even after he ends his call, he keeps the phone pressed to his ear, watching them, his—what? Colleagues? Friends? Family? Does he have one of those now? That wasn’t in the brochure.

“It was the teeth that really got him talking,” B tells Wedy. “People are just so attached to their teeth.”

She nods. “It’s true. I always go for the teeth if I want the job done within the day.”

Misa hands out pastries like a good fairy bestowing gifts. “There’s croissants, bagels. I got you a nut-free, dairy-free bran muffin, Light. Here’s three danishes for you, Ryuzaki.”

“You better have gotten me four,” B says.

“Uh, no.” Misa gives him a slinky grin and B gives it back to her. L hasn’t had time to wonder what has been going on between them for the past month beyond the evaluation that it’s been mutually beneficial. It keeps B out of trouble, anyway.

“In that case,” he menaces, smiling with his gums and wiggling his fingers, “I’m going to have to devour your soul for breakfast.”

“No!”

He tickles her. She thrashes and giggles and drops her tote, but it is obvious that she loves the benevolent attention, and that is probably the reason that he gives it to her. Light watches them with a frown, as if Misa’s genuine happiness is so foreign to him that he has to take pains to interpret it. Wedy rolls her eyes, crosses the room with slow intent, and sits down on the ottoman in front of Light’s chair. She crosses one leg over the other.

“Yagami,” she greets.

He straightens out his posture. “Wedy.”

The awareness that he’d tried to kill her at least once hangs palpably between them, but she doesn’t ask for an apology, and he doesn’t offer one. Light’s eyes keep darting to L. L gives him an expression that he hopes is encouraging but might just be blank.

“I hear you and I have a date tonight,” Wedy says.

“I—uh. Yes. I’m sorry.”

That makes her laugh, slim and unobtrusive. “You’re alright, kid. You’re just fine.”

Then she looks at L, too, and now they’re both facing him, both asking him for separate assurances that he doesn’t know how to give but would like to. “We should get to work,” he says. They both nod. That’s something that people like them like to hear. That’s something that people like him like to say.

 

—

 

L doesn’t know the full story of forgiveness between Wedy and B. He thinks that maybe it’s ongoing. He knows that B once tortured her for information, and he knows that they are now good friends, but the period of adjustment between these two states is, more than likely deliberately, indistinct. Neither of them like to talk about it because they are both ashamed, though of different things. The only thing that Wedy has said to L on the matter is: “There’s really no good explanation for B, but he’s just as good at taking pain away as he is at inflicting it. I guess I’m well within my rights to hate him, but I like having that right and having him at the same time.”

B, for his part, has been equally opaque and twice as obscene. “She likes to use the choke collar,” he’ll say, and salivate.

They keep the balcony doors open and smoke ceaselessly outside, crossing in and out to exchange information, pour cups of coffee, pick at pastries, and argue strategy. Misa tries out color swatches on Wedy’s wrist. Light refuses, under pain of death, to be “contoured” in any way, shape, or form. L gives them all tireless explanations of their roles, and eats his danishes.

The plan is this: Wedy will, with permission and access painstakingly granted from the High Commissioner of India to the UK, pose as an investor in the trade fair, with Light accompanying her as her young foreign trophy husband. Light will use his boyish charms to distract Riya Malhotra, who was known to have a taste for young disposable men even before her husband faked his death, and Wedy will take the opportunity to snoop through her things and find out where she’s staying. She will relay this information to L, who will then take B to the location in question, where he will break in and retrieve whatever evidence he can find of collusion between the Malhotras and certain members of the UK parliament. Tomorrow, arrests will be made, and L will be done with the nightmare case that has plagued him peripherally as unsolvable for the last four months.

There’s a lot of hashing out of particulars, constant talking, briefing, arguing, sometimes laughing. Light manages to warm up minimally to conversation, and Misa flutters a little at his every word. L supposes that reciprocation is at this point irrelevant to her. She is religious in her devotion to him, and he grants her small mercies of attention. She has fun at his expense, and he bears it with uncharacteristic patience. B dotes on both of them, and they each, in separate ways, lean into him.

L keeps to the edges. He works and works, and holds nobody’s eyes for too long. They all regard him with quiet expectance, glancing between him and Light, waiting for spectacle. He gives them none. Light orbits around him cautiously, taking care not to get too close, but once in his excitement he grips L by the shoulder and leans over him to get a better look at his computer with such thoughtless intimacy that the conversation in the room drops by a decibel and B gives them a big, shit-eating grin. L coughs and pretends not to notice.

The benefit starts at 7. They dress at 4. Wedy wears something black and slinky which L cannot really tell apart from any of her clothes beyond the fact that it has one shoulder strap instead of two. Misa curls her hair and does her make-up in soft, un-gratuitous pinks that make her look less smart and vicious than her usual red lipstick. Light surrenders himself to Misa’s gloss and powder for the sole purpose of letting her make him look a little older, though he swears that westerners can’t age him, anyway.

When he’s fully dressed in a Saint Laurent two-button, with polished leather shoes and a creaseless black button-up, his hair combed, his smile practiced and perfected into the right combination of inviting and coy, L has to look at the wall behind him instead of directly at him.

“What do you think?” Light asks the room, but he’s looking at L and enjoying his discomfort.

L swallows and turns back to his computer. “Yes, that will do.”

Nobody quite laughs, but they all seem to find his reaction appallingly funny.

“Alright, children,” he says. “Don’t let me down.”

 

—

 

The government is granting them plenty of liberties, but they draw the line at allowing Wedy and Light to come in wired, so all L and B have to go on is soundless security footage of the party and Wedy’s infrequent text message updates. They sit in the car with screens propped up between them. L eats red licorice and sips from an enormous thermos of coffee. B puts his feet up on the dashboard.. On the camera feed, they watch Wedy and Light make an aggressively convincing couple, pawing one another gracefully, laughing at certain shared jokes, drawing Riya in early and easily with their inattentive prettiness. Nothing is likely to happen until hours later, when everyone’s a few more drinks in, so L and B have little to do at this point but watch and wait and:

“So,” B starts.

“I can’t believe you gave him a gun.”

“Oh please. You’d probably be dead by now if I hadn’t, so consider rephrasing your reply,” he says as L opens his mouth, “into a _thank you, B._ ”

“Thank you, B, for giving the most prolific mass murderer in history a deadly weapon. Also, while we’re at it, thanks for jerking him off.”

B huffs with obvious enjoyment. “Uh, I didn’t jerk him off, I just jerked him. He wouldn’t let me finish. He ran straight after you, poor boy. God knows I sympathize. Well, it seems like it helped, anyway. I know you two made up.”

“We did no such thing.”

“I could smell you on one another.” He twiddles his nose. “No need to play coy.”

“We may have—come to a certain understanding, but nothing’s resolved. We were too busy being shot at.” L keeps his eyes locked on the screen where Light keeps smiling, talking, gesturing elegantly with his hands. He looks more real when he is lying.

B sighs, and grabs L by the chin so that he’ll look at him. “Come on. Don’t hide. You know I’ll always find you. Are you jealous, or something?”

L scoffs. “Oh, honestly,”—

“You know I only did it for you. I do everything for you.”

“Please don’t placate me. I know exactly what your intentions were, but you’re lying if you’re telling me you didn’t enjoy it at all.”

“I never said that.”

“You like him.” L doesn’t ask it like a question, but he feels it like one. “He’s dangerous, and he’s pretty, and he’s just your type.”

B’s nostrils flare a little bit. “He’s _so_ pretty.”

L snorts, and shrugs out of his grip. “Right, and he likes you, and not just because you keep offering him parts of me. I don’t think he’d want to admit it, but you’re the only person who’s done anything to quell his loneliness and sense of displacement since he’s been back, and I can tell he’s grateful for that.”

“So, then you are jealous?”

“Yes, but not because you made his dick hard. It’s because you know how to talk to him, what to say. I still panic every time I look him in the face and it’s been over a month. I feel like this is too good to be true and like there must be some catch, some hidden agenda, an oncoming plot twist chock full of notebooks and mind games. I didn’t realize until yesterday that I _am_ the catch. That the thing most likely to destroy the possibility of reconciliation between us is my own tendency towards self-sabotage. I’m jealous of you because you really are a better version of me and if I just left all of my emotional decisions up to you and regulated myself to the business end of things then I’d probably be much better off as a person.”

He says all of this tonelessly, and with his eyes trained on the screen, where blurry pixels construct and reconstruct an inadequate picture of Light’s face.

He feels B watching him. He feels his silence like a pall. B leans over the cup-holder and presses his forehead to L’s temple, his hand skittering up to twist into the hairs at the base of his neck. L doesn’t know if this means agreement or disagreement. He feels B’s breath against the shell of his ear, and shudders toward it.

“I’m so glad,” B murmurs, “that you finally realized my superiority. Now I get to be L, and you’re B. I hope the lace doesn’t chafe too badly.”

“Oh, shut-up,” L says, but he’s smiling. His skin feels tight on his face.

“I’ve got you, tiger. I’ll get you both, if I have to.”

L believes him.

 

—

 

Light leads Riya Malhotra down a hallway and kisses her. Technically, Light gets Riya Malhotra to lead him down the hallway, press him to a wall, and kiss him, all while making her believe that it was her own idea, but L knows better. He watches it play out on screen and tries not to overanalyze Light’s expressions. On another feed, Wedy digs through her purse. Within a few minutes, L’s phone buzzes with a text containing an address. He thanks Wedy, tells her to hold things down for a little while longer, and drives with inconspicuous speed to the house in question.

He is disappointed that it isn’t a hotel. He’d considered that the Malhotras might have property in the country, but he’d been hoping otherwise. B creeps up to the house, disappearing into the shrouding dark, and returns a half hour later to inform him that it’s fully secured, with an alarm system, cameras at every entrance, and an armed valet.

“I might be able to get in, but it’s just as likely that I won’t. We’re better off trying to get a warrant by tomorrow, and hitting her hard before she can leave the country.”

L relates this information to Wedy, and instructs her to collect Light and pull out at their earliest convenience. He watches on the camera as she waits for him to return with Riya, then feigns debilitating drunkenness and whispers something in his ear. Instead of making their goodbyes, however, they huddle together, speaking in low, apparently intimate voices, while Wedy surreptitiously types something into her phone.

Two minutes later, L receives a text that says: _Light says he has a plan. Trust him, y/n?_

L is slightly vexed to have the question that has plagued him without resolution since Light’s return put to him so bluntly and under such incontestable time constraints. He shoves two pieces of licorice in his mouth and goes with his gut.

He types back: _Y_.

 

—

 

Wedy fakes sloshed and Light brings her outside, presumably for a taxi, with Riya following a few paces behind. Then they’re gone from the camera feed and L’s got nothing to go on until a car pulls up the drive of the house they’re parked across the street from twenty minutes later. Riya opens Light’s door for him, which L finds a little charming, then presses him against it and kisses him, which L finds less charming. They stumble, gripping each other, up to the door, and disappear inside. Lights come on in the house and go off again. There’s no way to keep track of what’s going on, no way for Light to signal if he’s in danger, or for L to ask if he needs help. They just have to—ha—trust him.

Hours pass before he emerges. L is out of licorice and has a crick in his neck. B is reciting Dante’s _Inferno_ in Italian. He’s on the third circle and L is kind of getting into it by the time the front door opens and Light emerges, hair mussed and suit askew, onto the sidewalk. It started drizzling around midnight and by now it’s raining in thick, clattering peals. Light doesn’t come towards their car, or even look at it, just turns the corner. L waits five minutes, then pulls out in the opposite direction and rounds the block. They find him waiting patiently, drenched and frowning.

B kicks the backdoor open for him. The sound of the rain rises and then drops off sharply as he climbs in.

“Well?” L says.

“Do you have a pen and paper?”

L digs around in the glove compartment. He finds a yellow legal pad and a cheap, cap-less pen that has _Hankins Hardware_ and a phone number printed on it.

Light leans on the center console and begins writing. “This is the gate code. This is the code for the front door. Her bedroom is here,”—he sketches a small, astute diagram—“but she’s got an office down the hall with a safe in it. I don’t know the code for it, but I’m sure you can manage to figure that out. There’s one valet, armed, and another man she said was her personal assistant, also armed, who looked like he was patrolling a pretty set route. Around the grounds, up through the house and down again, like clock-work every thirty minutes. Oh, and she’s got two dogs. Small, so they shouldn’t be a problem, but they bark if they see strangers. Or,” he says, setting the pen down and sitting back, “maybe they just didn’t like the look of me.”

“Well,” L says.

B picks up the pad of paper, squints at it, and grins. “You, my friend, have just been promoted from junior detective.”

Light’s hair drips onto the leather seats. “Great. Now I can die happy.”

 

—

 

B drops them off at the flat and leaves, mercifully, to go check in with Wedy and plan for what he refers to as, “tomorrow’s heist.” L and Light stand at a respectful distance from one another in the elevator. L watches Light try not to shiver in his wet clothes and shiver anyway. He looks uneasy and exhausted. L wants to ask him things and to tell him other things, but he just stares at the numbers as they tick up and says nothing.

Once they’re inside, Light goes straight into the bedroom, but leaves the door open behind him. He strips off his shirt, moves to the bathroom, and leaves that door open, too. As Light showers, L sits on the bed and waits for his heart to stop pounding. Even though the danger is over, the physical symptoms of fear have yet to pass. His body is still worried that Light is not going to come out of that house. His brain waits, trapped and helpless, in the present.

He hears the stutter of the the pipes as the water turns off. The shower door clatters open and L’s pulse, which has only just settled, kicks up again. Light emerges drying his hair, then slings the towel over his shoulders, still dewy and radiating heat. L tries not to stare but he’s shit at that. Light used to preen but now he just shuffles over to the dresser and pulls out a pair of pajama pants that Misa must have thought were cute.

“You don’t—uh. You don’t need to put clothes on.”

Light pauses, mid-motion. He looks at L for the first time since they’ve been alone and gives him a pained smile. “I just want to sleep.”

“You can sleep. I didn’t mean—I’ve just seen you naked enough times that there’s really no need to be modest. Even before we met.” He points around the room, at cameras that aren’t there.

“Right,” Light says. He drops the bottoms back into the drawer and comes to sit down on the bed next to L. “Creep.”

Their knees touch. Light’s body is warm and L’s gets warm.

“Yes,” L says. “Yes, I am that.”

When he turns, their faces are very close together. Light kisses him softly, as if just to see what will happen. L swallows dryly and his throat chafes and he coughs against Light’s mouth. Light seems to find that hilarious. He pulls back and leans his grin against L’s cheek.

“I,” he says, “feel ill.”

“The sex was that bad?”

“No, it—well, I mean, I don’t know. With women—I don’t really know. It’s not that.”

“But you did have sex with her?”

Light nods. “I had to.”

“Believe me, I know the drill. Did you wear a condom?”

Light scoffs. “Of course.”

“I’m just checking. I’d rather ask now than bring it up later, when it becomes relevant to me. Which, let’s face it, it probably will.” He cups Light’s cheek in his hand, runs his thumb over the bag under his eye. “Are you okay? It can feel rather violating, when cases go that way.”

Light shakes his head. “That’s not why. I… wanted to kill her. I could have killed her. I thought about it the whole time. It would have been easy, with her guard down like that. I could have done it and I think I might have if I didn’t know how furious you would be.”

L shrugs. “They do say something about old habits and dying hard.”

“It wasn’t because she’s a criminal. Believe it or not, corporate espionage is not something I get particularly morally enflamed about. No.” He pulls back and stares L in the face. “I think I was just angry that she tried to have you assassinated. I still consider that to be my territory alone. That’s pretty fucked up, huh?”

L wishes it didn’t feel so good when Light said that. There is nothing justifiable about any of this.

“Well,” he asks, “do you still want to kill me?”

“No.”

There is no hesitation. That is no longer a relevant question. There are other questions now. Lifetimes of them. L pulls Light’s naked body toward his clothed one, and wraps him tight in his arms. Light takes a deep breath and lets it shudder back out. L falls back against the bed, and Light falls with him. They clutch each other with the desperation that one feels for the dead. It seems impossible that they should ever be able to make peace with one another, and yet peace is here. It weighs heavily against L’s chest.

“I don’t want to kill you, either,” he says.

Light presses his eyes closed and holds them like that. “I’d call that progress, wouldn’t you?”

They sleep gratefully, clinging to one another, limbs warm and breath warmer. L strips his clothes off at some point during the night and wakes tangled in the duvet with Light’s head tucked under his arm, the skin of his cheek pressed to his ribcage. The crease of his brow is relaxed for once, his shoulders loosed from their rigid posture. He looks guiltless and young. L feels perverse for how much pleasure Light’s mere bodily presence brings him.

His cell phone blinks with the green light that says he has a message. There are cases waiting to be solved. Many people in many places are at this moment getting away with unspeakable crimes. L should rise, but doesn’t. He folds his fingers between Light’s and, with the childish sense that he is doing something he shouldn’t, goes back to sleep.

 

—

 

Progress is the panic that L talks Light down from in Dr. Adeyemi’s waiting room, as she and B make benign and apologetic expressions at one another and talk around the truth. He calls her Doc and she says she’s not his doctor anymore, so he calls her Ruth and she gives him a smile of such nervous benevolence that L almost wants to call Grady and warn him.

“Look, just be honest. Don’t feel as if you have to justify or explain anything that you’re uncomfortable with—I’ve already given her all my files on you, as well as a draft of Mello’s report. Don’t try to play the role of Kira, or even Light Yagami, as you want him to be perceived. Just be yourself.”

Light keeps taking deep breaths and smoothing his palms over his slacks. “I don’t even know who that is.”

“That’s what you’re here to learn. It’s okay. I’ll be right on the other side of this door.”

“Will you listen to the recordings?”

“Only if I have a good reason. Why, do you want me to?”

Light shrugs. “I find it calming when you investigate me. I think I associate your hyper-vigilance with affection.”

L feels a tender guilt which is difficult to describe. “Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t be. You associate my religious zealotry with sexual arousal, and you’ve forgiven me that.”

L sighs, as B says something that makes Dr. Adeyemi laugh so loudly that she looks abashed afterwards. He says, “See, this is why we’re both in therapy.”

Progress is Light on one side of him and B on the other, neither above nor below, but around, within, breathing hard and swapping jokes at his expense which he is too far gone to fully register. A finger here, a mouth there, burning evil boys gone lukewarm for him, gone soft for him. B kisses the back his neck and holds him by the hips while Light sucks him off with eager grace. They might just as well have hated each other, but instead they treat one another like coconspirators, him like a secret they’re both in on. L says, “Kira have mercy,” when he comes, because it makes B cackle and Light preen.

Progress is the alley in Istanbul where stray cats peer around corners as Light holds a gun on a serial killer but does not pull the trigger, though his writing hand shakes with the effort of restraint and he must know L would protect him from every well-deserved consequence.

Progress is Misa, the night before her flight back to Japan for the autumn growing season, drinking a homemade margarita on L’s balcony and tipsily telling him that she’s glad that she didn’t ever have the opportunity to kill him.

“It makes me feel safe to know that you’re alive. I can’t explain it, but it does. I guess I just trust you to look after him, and if he’s alright, then I’m alright. And I think—Ryuzaki, it’s weird, but I think I’m alright.”

Progress is L, after so much haranguing, finally consenting to go to a loud, sweaty, sensorily overwhelming gay club and swallow drink after purple drink. Just before midnight, Light smiles and says, “I hate this part,” and B says, “I love this part,” and then glitter pours from the ceiling.

Progress is the disgustingly expensive watch that L buys Light, complete with a secret compartment under the face, as a show of trust. Progress is Light returning it to the shop the next day in exchange for one he likes better.

Progress is B sliding in sock-clad feet down the echoing hallways of L’s Villa outside Viterbo, blasting the Misfits at top volume and singing along with a pure and effusive mischief that L remembers from childhood: _If you’re gonna scream, scream with me_.

Progress is sitting in front of a shitty dive bar in LA after a 36-hour hostage situation has been resolved and watching B smoke and telling Light, in a voice so quiet it fades into the traffic on the road, true and solid facts about himself.

“My mother abandoned me in front of a church when I was a very small child. I was raised from age six onwards to be ruthless. The first person intended to succeed me as the world’s greatest detective hung himself at 17. The next one in line—that strange man over there feeding the squirrels beer nuts—became a prolific serial killer. A whole organization exists to produce my heir, and yet no one can seem to stand the idea of becoming me. All the frontrunners withdraw as soon as they realize how fucking abominable this job has made me. Or maybe it hasn’t? Maybe the fact that I’m like this is what made it possible for me to do what I have done—which I feel sick thinking about, honestly."

“I’ll be your heir.” Light gives him one of those smiles that he’d almost taken over the world with.

“What? Oh, you suppose you’re going to outlive me?”

“I am six years younger, and I take much better care of my body.” He shrugs. “We could ask B.”

“He won’t say. Anyway, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.”’

Progress comes in hotel suites, guest houses, international conferences, interrogation rooms, the Canadian wilderness, at the foot of the Burj Khalifa, in the parking lot at Nando’s. It comes with arson, grave-robbing, organ theft, arms smuggling, bank heists, slow poison assassinations. It comes with Light asleep in bed while L jabs his keyboard on the floor beside him, with B throwing an arm over each of their shoulders when they fight over nothing and telling them to, “cut it the fuck out,” with Mello’s second draft and the joy Light gets from marking it up with judgmental red pen ink, with the London fog wafting past the windows at dawn while the flat is silent, and L feeling with the whole of himself that he is alive, he has survived to see this moment.

Progress stops being progress, eventually, and becomes: life.

 

—

 

They bring Light to Wammy’s House for Christmas.

L and Quillsh argue the matter down to the quick from mid-November onward but reach no satisfactory compromise, so L, characteristically unscrupulous, pulls rank and will hear no more about it. He introduces Light to the students and most of the staff as his heir apparent, but allows theories about the mysterious Japanese boy, who would probably have been in high school at the time of Kira’s emergence, to fly wild. He will be the first to admit that he takes great pleasure in scandal, as long as he need only experience it peripherally.

The house is hung with holly, the window panes iced over. Light finds western Christmas excessive and nearly incomprehensible, and struggles to understand a biblical connection that isn’t there. He complains about the singing and the drafty cold of the attic. Eventually he asks for a separate room of his own, at which Roger practically melts with orthodox relief, but spends most of his time in L’s, anyway, exploring his things with the cautious delight of an archeologist at an untouched sight, critiquing all his tastes and exalting every chink he finds in the armor.

B, a minor hit at last year’s festivities even without the nose ring, draws a daily crowd of young prodigies around the fireplace for ghost stories. Rumor abounds that if you answer one of his riddles correctly, he’ll pour a surreptitious helping of rum into your eggnog. L, eventually, is forced to insist upon a minimal age requirement for this prize.

Linda is hell on the violin once more, and L learns that she, in the absence of Mello, Matt, and Near, has become the top student at Wammy’s house, and therefore technically first in line to succeed him. Fifteen, willowy, and clattering her walking cane across the floor in front of her, she approaches Light directly and tells him in no uncertain terms to expect vicious competition. He regards her with stunned discomfort, and later informs L and B that this is a damagingly competitive environment for children to grow up in, at which they both snort and nod, and then expresses his earnest wish that he had been raised here.

Near returns briefly from the US for three days only, during which he and Mello get into a fight—read: Mello swings and Near sighs and ducks—which L correctly supposes to have been centered around himself. He spends Christmas eve in the nurse’s office with them and attempts to resolve things.

“He said that you were corrupt.”

“Mello, I _am_ corrupt.”

“Yeah, well—he’s—fucking short.”

“I believe that Mello’s projecting his own height-related insecurities, as well as his misgivings about your moral standing, onto me. It’s alright. It’s his way of processing.” Near twirls his hair about his finger, avid and level-headed.

L finds B and Light in A’s room on Boxing Day. Everything of his was long ago packed away or sold off, but the beam that he hung himself from has never been repaired. They sit side-by-side below the window and speak in low voices. L could go in but pauses around the corner of the doorframe instead.

“Hyuk hyuk.”

“Don’t.”

“I know you see him, too.”

“Rarely. I asked him to keep his distance. I don’t need that kind of temptation. Not right now.”

“But later?”

“I don’t know.” Light’s voice trembles, momentarily drowned out by the clang of the pipes in the walls. “If it falls out of the sky and into my lap—I honestly don’t know.”

“You realize that I’d have to stop you. I wouldn’t like to, but I’d kill you for him.”

“I understand. I hope you know that if it came to it, I’d kill you for him, too.”

“As long as we’re on the same page, beautiful.”

They fly back to London for New Year’s. B wears gimmicky pink glasses of which the 00’s in 2006 are the eyeholes and kisses Wedy on the mouth when the clock chimes midnight. L and Light stand shoulder to shoulder and display no such blatant affection, but elbow one another consolingly. B drags L out of bed at an ungodly hour of the morning and shoves a laptop at him, declaring with delirious smugness, “You’ve got to see this! Someone has provided inarguable and fully sourced proof of the validity of the Robot Theory!”

 

—

 

Light Yagami turns twenty. They are in a detention center in Minsk for a corruption case on February 28th, and there are no candles to blow out and no wishes to make, but the look Light gives him when L says, “So, what would you like?” is overwhelming in the simplicity of its gratitude. It is a hard question, and cruel in its way, but they have learned to manage one another’s cruelties just like they have learned to manage their own.

Light shrugs. “Oh, you know. Money, power, glory. Armies of worshipful followers. That sort of thing.”

“I’m sure I can arrange something.”

They forgive each other everything, not because they deserve it, but because they want to. Sitting side-by-side in the cell, in matching navy blue scrubs that chafe in all the worst places, they conceal their grins and wait for B to arrive with the helicopter. Night comes on.

 

-

 

end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah, yeah. i've gone soft. i realize that Light Abandons the Death Note for Love is cheesy lawlight trope #4. don't @ me.
> 
> and hey! thanks for sticking with me. i don't think i can properly verbalize my gratitude. thank you again for reading. any and all comments are appreciated.


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